Since the start of the financial crisis, industrial country public debt levels have increased dramatically. And they are set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. A number of countries face the prospect of large and rising future costs related to the ageing of their populations. In this...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and tax policy feedback rules in acalibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices. The government makesexogenous final good purchases, levies a proportional income tax, and issues nominalone-period bonds. A quadratic approximation...

We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse,in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy’stotal value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rentswill alter the incentives of a political leader....

The extinction of genetic resources as a consequence of land development, especially in ‘biodiversity hot spots’like rain forests in South America or South East Asia, is becoming a serious problem - not only for local communitiesbut also for international firms in the pharmaceutical...

We use a unique dataset of bond downgrades from a niche rating company that has been found to be reacting faster to publicly available information than its competitors. Using regime-switching models we propose risk measures to quantify stock return disturbances (distress costs) associated with...

This paper focuses on the robust Effcient Method of Moments (EMM) estimation of a general parametric stationary process and proposes a broad framework for constructing robust EMM statistics in this context. This extends the application field of robust statistics to very general time series...

Inspired by findings of lowdimensional nonlinearities and the Theorem of Takens (1983) forecasting models of financial time series are often built upon nonparametric, i.e. universal nonlinear, univariate relationships. Empirical investigations, however, are seriously contaminated by the problem...

Conventional time series analysis, focusing exclusively on a time series at a given scale, lacks the ability to explain the nature of the data generating process. A process equation that successfully explains daily price changes, for example, is unable to characterize the nature of hourly price...

In this paper, we investigate the relative performance of Value-at-Risk (VaR) models with the daily stock market returns of nine di.erent emerging markets. In addition to well-known modeling approaches such as variance-covariance method and historical simulation, we study the extreme value...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of scaling and multifractal properties of U.S. Dollar-Deutschemark (USD-DEM) returns. The data set is ten years of 5-minute returns. The cumulative return distributions of positive and negative tails at di.erent time intervals are linear in the...