The country risk literature argues that country risk ratings have a direct impact on the cost of borrowings as they reflect the probability of debt default by a country. An improvement in country risk ratings, or country creditworthiness, will lower a country’s cost of borrowing and debt...

Introduction / Michael McAleer -- Assessment of risk ratings and risk returns for 120 representative countries / Michael McAleer -- Conditional volatility models for risk ratings and risk returns / Michael McAleer -- Univariate and multivariate estimates of symmetric and asymmetric conditional...

Country risk has become a topic of major concern for the international financial community over the last two decades. The importance of country ratings is underscored by the existence of several major country risk rating agencies, namely the Economist Intelligence Unit, Euromoney, Institutional...

Several methods have recently been proposed in the ultra high frequency financial literature to remove the effects of microstructure noise and to obtain consistent estimates of the integrated volatility (IV) as a measure of ex-post daily volatility. Even bias-corrected and consistent (modified)...

The El Niños Southern Oscillations (ENSO) is a periodical phenomenon of climatic interannual variability which could be measured through either the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) or the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Index. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze these two indexes in...

This paper presents an application of a recently developed approach by Matteson and James (2012) for the analysis of change points in a data set, namely major financial market indices converted to financial return series. The general problem concerns the inference of a change in the distribution...