We examine how poor macroeconomic performance, mainly in the role of high rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The results based initially on aggregate time-series, and then on the relatively novel sub-national panel time-series data and...

While the risk return trade-off theory suggests a positive relationship between the expected return and the conditional volatility, the volatility feedback theory implies a channel that allows the conditional volatility to negatively affect the expected return. We examine the effects of the risk...

This paper employs symmetric GARCH models to investigate the volatility on the Romanian and American stock markets. We consider two empiric time series from each market, consisting in daily logarithmic returns. For Bucharest Stock Exchange, we include the composite index BET-C and TLV...

Using a daily time series from 1983 to 2005 of currency prices in spot and forward USD/Yen markets and matching equivalent maturity short term US and Japanese interest rates, we investigate the sensitivity over the sample period of the difference between actual prices in forward markets to those...

This paper identifies the expansion and contraction phases of New Zealand's national and regional house prices, by employing techniques typically used to study cycles in real activity, the so-called Classical cycle dating method. We then enquire into the nature of the cycles, addressing five...

This paper proposes a contemporaneous smooth transition threshold autoregressive model (C-STAR) as a modification of the smooth transition threshold autoregressive model surveyed in Terauml;svirta (1998), in which the regime weights depend on the ex ante probability that a latent regime-specific...

The use of non-linear models to accurately estimate the Value at Risk (VaR) of financial portfolios is increasing. Specifically, the use of Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) models, which can forecast the time-varying volatility of a financial asset. In this research paper...

We develop a framework in which information about firm value is noisily observed. Investors are then faced with a signal extraction problem. Solving this would enable them to probabilistically infer the fundamental value of the firm and, hence, price its stocks. If the innovations driving the...

In this paper, the authors report estimates of two-and three-state Markov switching models applied to inflation, measured using consumer price indexes, in the G-7 countries. They report tests that show that two-state models are preferred to simple one-state representations of the data, and argue...

The Canadian economy is currently in transition from a period of disinflation to one with a very low and relatively stable inflation rate. Against this background, the author asks whether reduced-form parameters should be expected to be invariant to changes in the inflation process. This raises...