A quarterly time series of the aggregate commission rate of NYSE trading for the period 1980-2003 is developed. The aggregate commission rate is of significant size, captures trading cost, and reflects market illiquidity. Consistent with financial theory, I find a positive relation between...

Portfolio managers favor long-term investment horizons. Their performance is usually forecasted using either the arithmetic mean or the geometric mean. The harmonic mean is generally ignored as an instrument of financial and/or portfolio management. We examine the performance of the harmonic...

The purpose of this paper is to compare four major exchange rate models. Based on the value of adjusted R2, the uncovered interest parity model performs best, followed by the purchasing power parity model using the relative PPI, the Mundell-Fleming model, and the monetary model. The unexpected...

During the last two decades, Post Keynesian/Kaleckian distribution and growth models have gradually focused their attention on the effects that monetary policy and financial variables are likely to have on the macroeconomy. These models usually rely on the influence of debt, debt services and...

International stock markets worldwide experienced a downturn in stock prices and activities following the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. in mid-2008. This suggests that stock prices volatility do spillover from one market to another. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the...

Fama and French’s (1999) internal rate of return method is applied to Datastream data from 1993-2001 for 81 non-financial firms listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. The nominal return on value is 7.09%. The real return on value is 5.07%. The nominal return on cost is 11.59%. The real...

This paper analyzes monetary policy conditions in Spain before and after the changeover to the Euro as the single European currency. We use forward-looking Taylor-type rules to describe the Banco de España's pre-Euro monetary policy and find that it was clearly inflation stabilizing. Compared...

This paper uses annual US data to examine the causal relationship between immigration and real GDP. Despite its implications for policy, a statistically robust relationship between these two series has been difficult to pin down. Our tests reveal that both the series are break-stationary....

In this paper, we conduct a set of Monte Carlo sampling experiments to examine the effect of design characteristics on the inequality restricted maximum entropy (RME) estimator. We generate data under varying design characteristics, and estimate the parameters using maximum entropy and least...

By nature, people are guided by self-interests. Although all income groups have a stake in economic matters, the highest income groups are likely to have a much greater say in affecting the macro economy. Identifying the interests of higher income groups with regard to the economy is, therefore,...