Many seasonal macroeconomic time series are subject to changes in their means and variances over a long time horizon. In this paper we propose a general treatment for the modelling of time-varying features in economic time series. We show that time series models with mean and variance functions...

We combine the resource curse literature with the literature on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to investigate two hypotheses, namely (i) natural resources wealth: countries with a comparative advantage in natural resources attract more M&As in natural resource intensive sectors and...

We argue that the failure to disentangle the evolution of the Canadian currency from the U.S. currency leads to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding the case of Dutch disease in Canada. We propose a new approach that is aimed at extracting both currency components and energy- and...

This paper considers spot variance path estimation from datasets of intraday high frequency asset prices in the presence of diurnal variance patterns, jumps, leverage effects and microstructure noise. We rely on parametric and nonparametric methods. The estimated spot variance path can be used...

We analyze the economic forces underlying cross-border Mergers and Acquistions (M&As) using a large bilateral panel data set. The frequent occurrence of zero observations provides essential information on the structure of M&A flows, which we model empirically using a two-stage procedure. At the...