The Ease of Doing Business Index is widely used by multinationals in their investment location decisions. Factor analysis and Chronbach’s alpha show its limited consistency and descriptive power of the business environment.

We study the business cycle in the US over 1959–2011 using a large-dimensional multi-level factor model. We find notable asymmetries over the business cycle, but the bulk of common dynamics is stable over time. The comovement among variables is larger in recessions compared to expansions. The...

The paper studies the interaction between aggregation and persistence pertaining to skip sampling of stock variables as well as temporal aggregation of flow variables for the generalized fractional processes. We show that, for skip sampling, the long memory feature at the zero frequency can...

In this paper we propose a new methodology in improving the Diffusion Index forecasting model (Stock and Watson, 2002a, 2002b) using hard thresholding with robust KVB statistic for regression hypothesis tests (Kiefer et al., 2000). The new method yields promising results in the context of long...

We proposed a method to estimate extreme conditional quantiles by combining quantile GARCH model of Xiao and Koenker (2009) and extreme value theory (EVT) approach. We first estimate the latent volatility process using the information of intermediate quantiles. We then apply EVT to the tail...

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 paper employs panel methods that address/mitigate heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence to determine the direction and sign of long-run causality between transport energy consumption per capita and real GDP per capita. Granger-causality was determined to run from GDP to energy.

Empirical evidence suggests that asset returns correlate more strongly in bear markets than conventional correlation estimates imply. We propose a method for determining complete tail-correlation matrices based on Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. We demonstrate how to obtain more efficient...

We propose an empirical likelihood-based method of inference for comparing inequality between two populations. A series of Monte Carlo experiments are used to assess our method’s finite sample performance. We illustrate our approach using some Canadian household income data.

In this paper we consider the problem of interpreting the signs of the estimated coefficients in multivariate time series regressions where the regressors are correlated. Using a continuous time model, we argue that focusing on the signs of individual coefficients in such regressions could be...