We make a case for the usefulness of an optimal control approach for the central banks' choice of interest rates in inflation target regimes. We illustrate it with data from selected developed and emerging countries with longest experience of inflation targeting.

We make a case for the usefulness of an optimal control approach for the central banks' choice of interest rates in inflation target regimes. We illustrate it with data from selected developed and emerging countries with longest experience of inflation targeting.

We evaluate the performance of 307 Brazilian stock mutual funds employing stochastic frontiers. We list the top ten actively managed funds and the bottom ten for the period April 2001-July 2003, and show that a fund's efficiency increases with management skill to beat the market. We also find...

We revisit the issue of comovements of emerging and developed stockmarkets, and provide a simultaneous treatment of data for the eighties and nineties. We show that while emerging markets experience greater instability in the long term than their developed counterparts, there is room for...

We detected bubbles in 22 emerging stockmarkets using both standard and threshold cointegration. Eighteen stockmarkets experienced explosive bubbles (and some of them periodically collapsing bubbles as well). The remaining four markets experienced periodically collapsing bubbles only.

We put forward a technique based on cluster analysis to group stocks in spot markets according to a risk-return criterion. We show how an informed investor will make money using the cluster analysis to select stocks of major companies from North and South America.

Employing both cointegration analysis and a variety of Granger causality tests, we examine whether the Brazilian stockmarket is efficient in processing new information about public macroeconomic data (semi-strong efficiency). We find the stockmarket to be inefficient, which is in line with most...

The scaling of the probability distribution of the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange index is shown to be described by a Levy stable stochastic process for the modal region of the distribution. Data refer to daily records for the 30-year period 1968-1998. The truncated Levy process is characterized by a...

We show that a two-harmonic log-periodic formula fits the high-frequency data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, which encompass the recent episode known as the “flash crash†of May 6, 2010.

Financial economists usually assess market efficiency in absolute terms. This is a shortcoming. One way of dealing with the relative efficiency of markets is to resort to the efficiency interpretation provided by algorithmic complexity theory. This paper employs such an approach in order to rank...