We investigate the sustainability of Italy’s public finances from 1862 to 2012 adopting a non-linear perspective. Specifically, we employ the smooth transition regression approach to explore the scope for non-linear fiscal adjustments of primary surpluses in response to the accumulation of...

Countercyclical government spending offers social protection to the vulnerable when economies move into recession. This paper questions the extent to which governments are able to spend countercyclically and the extent to which social expenditures are likely to be countercyclical. An analysis of...

This paper tests the predictions that (i) sub-central government expenditures are procyclical and (ii) sub-central government expenditures are likely to be more procyclical than central government spending. The predictions are based on the importance of ‘voracity effects’ and on the...

I examine if the 2009 bank stress test conducted by the Federal Reserve conveyed new information to investors. By analyzing bank bond returns, I show that the announcement of the bank stress test results mitigated information asymmetries in US banks.

This article tests the linearity assumption underlying the popular heterogeneous autoregressive model for realized volatility (HAR-RV). We implement a consistent model specification test that is robust to both distributional and model misspecification. We find that, using a nonparametric HAR-RV...

We find that an expansion of credit has a positive effect on per capita output growth only up to a point. Beyond this threshold the impact of finance on growth is not statistically significant anymore. We show, however, that the estimated non-linear relationship may stem from the omission of...

This paper extends Hong et al. (2007)’s model-free test to analyze the contagion. A simulation experiment reveals that our test has reasonable size and good power in finite sample. We use this test and find the strong evidence of contagion between crude oil and stock markets.

Amid its rapidly increasing usage and immense public interest the subject of Bitcoin has raised profound economic and societal issues. In this paper we undertake economic and econometric modelling of Bitcoin prices. As with many asset classes we show that Bitcoin exhibits speculative bubbles....

This experiment shows that varying the commission received by financial advisors strongly influences insurance purchase.