Most of the empirical studies dealing with international business cycles have disregarded the credibility issues that play an important role in the decision to join or not a monetary union. Most of empirical applications based on asymmetric shocks have failed to account for these aspects. In...

The annual structure of the real GDP in the UK, France, Germany and Italy is examined in this article by means of fractionally integrated techniques. Using a version of a testing procedure due to Robinson (1994), we show that the series can be specified in terms of I(d) statistical models with d...

We show in this article that fractionally integrated univariate models for GDP may lead to a better replication of business cycle characteristics. We firstly show that the business cycle features are clearly affected by the degree of integration as well as by the other short run components of...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...

We consider an investor maximizing his expected utility from terminal wealth with portfolio decisions based on the available information flow. This investor faces the opportunity to acquire some additional initial information G.. The subjective fair value of this information for the investor is...

This paper describes a financial market modelling framework that exploits the notion of a deflator . The denominations of the deflator measured in units of primary assets form a minimal set of basic financial quantities that completely specify the overall market dynamics, where deflated asset...

The paper proposes a financial market model that generates stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rate using a minimal number of factors that characterise the dynamics of the different denominations of the deflator. It models asset prices essentially as functionals of square root and...

This paper introduces a benchmark model for financial markets, which is based on the unique characterization of a benchmark portfolio that is chosen to be the growth optimal portfolio. The general structure of risk premia for asset prices and portfolios is derived. Furthermore, the short rate is...