The first essay studies the effects of exogenous and endogenous shocks on output sustainability in Central Eastern Europe and Russia during the 2000s. It expands traditional vector autoregressive model to a multi-country model that relates bank real lending, the cyclical component of output and...

In the literature, many statistical models have been used to investigate the existence of a deterministic time trend, changing persistence and nonlinearity in macroeconomic and financial data. Good understanding of these properties in a univariate time series model is crucial when making...

This thesis addresses three current issues in maritime economics by the applicationof semi-parametric estimations within a generalized additive model framework. First, this thesis shows that there are vessel and contract specific differences intime charter rates for dry bulk vessels. The...