Essays in Empirical Finance: Evaluating Risk in FinancialMarketsBy Alysa V. ShcherbakovaThis dissertation is comprised of two parts, each addressing animportant type of financial risk. The first part is composed of anessay discussing Market Risk. This essay examines a causalrelationship between...

This thesis presents and compares the performance of two recently developed classification methods namely the Spatial Stagewise Aggregation procedure and Support Vector Machines. Both techniques are convenient for the application to corporate bankruptcy analysis, in terms of calculation of...

Apart from an extensive survey of the literature on the economics of corporate bankruptcy law, this thesis contains three own contributions: First, a model is presented where a firm's manager acquires some private information about whether a firm should be liquidated or stay in business....

Since the publication of Keynes' “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” in 1936 many new ideas and solution concepts for macroeconomic problems emerged, disappeared, and were combined in order to appropriately describe macroeconomic phenomena. Nowadays, New Keynesian frameworks...

Dua and Miller (1996) created leading and coincident employment indexes for the state of Connecticut, following Moore's (1981) work at the national level. The performance of the Dua-Miller indexes following the recession of the early 1990s fell short of expectations. This paper performs two...

This dissertation investigates the properties of macroeconomic fluctuations in a small open economy under the presence of sovereign default risk. International borrowing and lending arise from the interaction between a risk averse sovereign representative agent in a small open economy trying to...

Dramatic changes in the relative prices of goods in international trade have accompanied, and indeed preceded, the global crisis. These changes are reflected in the terms of trade ofindividual countries and in the relative prices of goods within those countries. Asia-Pacific countries are...

Dramatic changes in the relative prices of goods in international trade have accompanied, and indeed preceded, the global crisis. These changes are reflected in the terms of trade of individual countries and in the relative prices of goods within those countries. Asia-Pacific countries are...

We contribute to the task of identifying trends and cycles in energy prices by examining very long series of prices for coal and oil, going back to 1650 in the case of coal and 1859 in the case of oil. We find annual rates of increase in real price of greater than two percent are found for coal...