This paper highlights the strategic role that private quality standards play in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the producers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric...

Due to its technical complexity, the co-production of electricity generation and nuclear weapons, and its high fixed costs, nuclear power is a particularly complex commodity, which poses unusual challenges for state economic (or industrial, defense, innovation etc.) policy. As in other sectors,...

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to...

In this paper we use fractional integration techniques to examine the degree of integration of four US stock market indices, namely the Standard and Poor, Dow Jones, Nasdaq and NYSE, at a daily frequency from January 2005 till December 2009. We analyse the weekly structure of the series and...

This paper examines the relationship between US disposable personal income (DPI) and house price index (HPI) during the last twenty years applying fractional integration and long-range dependence techniques to monthly data from January 1991 to July 2010. The empirical findings indicate that the...

This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an...

In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of a high-frequency financial time series dataset. It focuses on temporal aggregation and other features of the data, and how they might affect the degree of dependence of the series. Fractional integration or I(d) models are estimated with a...