This paper uses both conditional and unconditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models in order to determine different environmental efficiency levels for a sample of 110 countries in 2007. In order to capture the effect of countries compliance with the Kyoto Protocol Agreement (KPA), we...

The scaling properties encompass in a simple analysis many of the volatility characteristics of financial markets. That is why we use them to probe the different degree of markets development. We empirically study the scaling properties of daily Foreign Exchange rates, Stock Market indices and...

The Markowitz mean-variance optimizing framework has served as the basis for modern portfolio theory for more than 50 years. However, efforts to translate this theoretical foundation into a viable portfolio construction algorithm have been plagued by technical difficulties stemming from the...

In many economic contexts, a given function can be disaggregated as a linear combination of gradients. Examples include the literature on the characterization of aggregate demand and excess demand, as initiated by Sonnenschein (1973ab), and the model of efficient household behaviour recently...

This paper aims at increasing our insights into the way financial markets respond to news. We view the market as a (nonlinear) filter of news on fundamentals. A stylized version of this situation is obtained by considering by a time dependent dividend rate which is driving the market. To model...

This paper prepared for the Handbook of Statistics (Vol.14: "Statistical Methods in Finance"), surveys the subject of stochastic volatility. the following subjects are covered: volatility in financial markets (instantaneous volatility of asset returns, implied volatilities in option prices and...

Since the Finnish unemployment rate has rocketed to a very high level in the beginning of the 1990?s it is worth to study to what extent the unemployment rate prevailing today is due to cyclical or to structural reasons. In this paper we try to estimate two different indicators that represent...

Do well-functioning stock markets and banks promote long-run economic growth? Recent studies answer this important question in the affirmative. This paper presents a reasonable extreme bounds analysis of the empirical relationships between the financial system and economic growth as well as the...