Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

Stock markets play a key role in corporate financing in Asia. However, despite their increasing importance in terms of size and cross-border investment activity, the region’s markets are reputed to be more “idiosyncratic†and less reliant on economic and corporate fundamentals...

Recently, Xu and Wu (2001) presented generalized minimum aberration criterion for comparing and selecting general fractional factorial designs. This criterion is defined using a set of χ<Subscript> u </Subscript>(D) values, called J-characteristics by us. In this paper, we find a set of linear equations that relate...</subscript>

We explore the stability properties of interest rate rules granting an explicit response to stock prices in a New-Keynesian DSGE model populated by Blanchard-Yaari non-Ricardian households. The constant turnover between long-time stock holders and asset-poor newcomers generates a financial...

Financial processes may possess long memory and their probability densities may display heavy tails. Many models have been developed to deal with this tail behaviour, which reflects the jumps in the sample paths. On the other hand, the presence of long memory, which contradicts the efficient...

This study examines stock market contagion from the United States to the markets of the GCC countries during the period 2007-08. These countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) were also experiencing accelerating debt levels, overheated real estate...

The efficacy of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts was a major topic of discussion in the 2010 midterm elections. I investigate the effect of the possible expiration and eventual extension of the dividend tax cut on US stock market performance in 2010 based on the methodology used by Amronin,...

The rapid growth of OBSA in recent years has concerned bank regulators that such OBSA are risk-increasing and should be brought under control throughadditional capital requirements. Previous empirical literature tested the riskiness of certain OBSA by employing systematic or total risk as...

Most research on stock prices is based on the present value model or the more general consumption-based model. When applied to real economic data, both of them are found unable to account for both the stock price level and its volatility. Three essays here attempt to both build a more realistic...