The purpose of the System Dynamics method is to study the relationship between structure and behavior in non-linear, dynamic systems. In such systems, the significance of various structural components to the behavior pattern exhibited, changes as the behavior unfolds. Changes in structural...

The aim of this paper is to obtain some statistical properties about runs of daily returns of ISE30, ISE50 and ISE100 indices and compare these results with the empirical stylized facts of developed stock markets. In this manner, all time historical daily closing values of these indices are...

Applied economists working with time series data face a dilemma in selecting between models with deterministic and stochastic trends. While models with deterministic trends are widely used, models with stochastic trends are not so well known. In an influential paper Harvey (1997) strongly...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by...

In this paper, I present an introduction to quantitative research methods in social sciences. The paper is intended for non-Economics undergraduate students, development researchers and practitioners who although unfamiliar with statistical techniques, are interested in quantitative methods to...

I investigate how well market valuation and yield measures predict the maximum sustainable withdrawal rate (MWR) that a person can use with their retirement savings to obtain inflation-adjusted income over a 30-year period. The regression framework includes variables to predict long-term stock...

Countless current and prospective retirees now rely on portfolio success rates calculated from the historical data for different retirement withdrawal strategies when planning their own retirements. Past history-based studies ushered forth what has become known as the 4 percent rule for...

Extreme Value Theory is increasingly used in the modelling of financial time series. The non-normality of stock returns leads to the search for alternative distributions that allows skewness and leptokurtic behavior. One of the most used distributions is the Pareto Distribution because it allows...

(Re)insurance companies need to model their liabilities' portfolio to compute the risk-adjusted capital (RAC) needed to support their business. The RAC depends on both the distribution and the dependence functions that are applied among the risks in a portfolio. We investigate the impact of...

This paper proposes a new method for approximating vector autoregressions by a finite-state Markov chain. The method is more robust to the number of discrete values and tends to outperform the existing methods over a wide range of the parameter space, especially for highly persistent vector...