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) to investigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioral assumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating of beliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) among agents. The recently introduced...

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,...

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...

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...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <I>Economics Letters</I> (2014). Vol. 123(3), pages 291-294.<P> 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...</p></i>

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,...

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...

This paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurship (as measured by fluctuations in the business ownership rate) and unemployment in Japan for the period between 1972 and 2002. We find that, although Japan’s unemployment rate has been influenced by specific exogenous shocks, the...