Periods of economic and financial stress traditionally give rise to profound changes in economic theory and in the way policy decisions are taken. Motivated by the recent interest in renewing macroeconomics after the global financial crisis, we collected the views of senior central bank staff in...

We consider an artificial population of forward looking heterogeneous agents making decisions between schooling, employment, employment with training and household production, according to a behavioral model calibrated to a large set of stylized facts. Some of these agents are subject to policy...

The popular impression that Africa has not integrated into world trade, as suggested by the evolution in simple indicators, has been called into question recently by more formal analysis. This paper refines and generalizes this analysis and lends support to the popular view of disintegration,...

The problem of forecasting the economic systems' activity over a large time horizon is the main concern of both the researchers in the economic field and the system managers. In most cases, its solving is reduced to simulating the structure of the economic indicators which render the system...

Investment in infrastructure such as the information and communication technology sector requires large, substantial amounts, most of which are sunk or irreversible. Uncertainty of market demand, competition, costs and public policy complicates the investment decision process. This paper...

In this paper we theoretically and empirically analyse the capability to social interaction between parents and children in Italy, within a capability approach framework. For this purpose, after having identified the functionings and conversion factors related to this capability, we have built...

In this paper, we test the weak-form stock market efficiency for the Tunisian stock market (TSE). Our empirical approach is founded on the analysis of the behaviour over time of the Hurst's exponent. Thus, we computed the Hurst's exponent using a “rolling sample†with a time window of...

Academic macroeconomics and the research department of central banks have come to be dominated by Dynamic, Stochastic, General Equilibrium (DSGE) models based on micro-foundations of optimising representative agents with rational expectations. We argue that the dominance of this particular sort...

I investigate the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) on the returns and volatilities of eleven major European share markets, and test the proposition that the GFC developed over two stages: a subprime mortgage crisis (pre-Lehman), and a more severe global liquidity shortage phase...

Researchers in finance very often rely on highly persistent Ñ nearly integrated Ñ explanatory variables to predict returns. This paper proposes to stand up to the usual problem of persistent regressor bias, by detrending the highly auto-correlated predictors. We find that the statistical...