This paper features an analysis of volatility spillover effects from Australia's major trading partners, namely, China, Japan, Korea and the United States, for a period running from 12th September 2002 to 9th September 2012. This captures the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). These...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) toinvestigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioralassumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating ofbeliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) amongagents. The recently introduced concept of...

In this paper I examine various extensions of the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model with the purpose of fitting and forecasting the term structure of interest rates. As expected, I find that using more flexible models leads to a better in-sample fit of the term structure. However, I show that the...

We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...

Hausman (1978) developed a widely-used model specification test that has passed the test of time. The test is based on two estimators, one being consistent under the null hypothesis but inconsistent under the alternative, and the other being consistent under both the null and alternative...

This paper proposes a novel approach to introduce time-variation in structural parameters of DSGE models. Structural parameters are allowed to evolve over time via an observation-driven updating equation. The estimation of the resulting DSGE model can be easily performed by maximum likelihood...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady flow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

On average, child health outcomes are better in urban than in rural areas of developing countries. Understanding the nature and the causes of this rural-urban disparity is essential in contemplating the health consequences of the rapid urbanization taking place throughout the developing world...

The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an...

Over a five-year period in the 1990s Vietnam experienced annual economic growth of more than 8% and a decrease of 15 points in the proportion of children chronically malnourished (stunted). We estimate the extent to which changes in the distribution of child nutritional status can be explained...