Article 13 of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, known as the "Peace Clause," precludes most WTO dispute settlement challenges against a country that is complying with the Agreement's liberalization commitments - until 1 January 2004, when the Peace Clause will expire. This article evaluates the...

In this paper, we describe the development and current status of anti-manipulation rules as they apply to wholesale electricity and natural gas markets in the United States and the European Union, including the institutions that are responsible for overseeing these rules. We then compare and...

We construct a database of U.S. federal court decisions pertaining to copyright and changes in federal statutory copyright law, and use this database to assemble indices measuring changes in the breadth of copyright protection. We combine our indices with information on excess returns to equity...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...

In the paper we introduce an empirical approximation of the log-optimal investment strategy that guarantees an almost optimal growth rate of investments. The proposed strategy also considers the effects of portfolio rearrangement costs on growth optimality and advises a suboptimal portfolio for...

In project appraisal under uncertainty, the economic reliability of a measure of financial efficiency depends on its strong NPV-consistency, meaning that the performance metric (i) supplies the same recommendation in accept-reject decisions as the NPV, (ii) ranks competing projects in the same...

In this paper three econometric issues related to private-equity return indices, such as real estate indices, are explored (smoothing, nonsynchronous appraisal, and cross-sectional aggregation). Under certain assumptions, it is found that index returns based on appraisals follow an ARFIMA(0,d,1)...

When used to price popular bond futures options, the Black model is subject to a moneyness bias similar to the Black-Scholes stock index option bias. It is shown that a suitably modified version of Stutzer's canonical stock option pricing model (Stutzer, J.Finance, 1996, 1633-52 ) also helps...

We examine the impact of tail risk on the return dynamics of size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, and idiosyncratic volatility sorted portfolios. Our time-series analyses document significant portfolio return exposures to aggregate tail risk. In particular, portfolios that contain small, value,...

This paper considers multiple measures of risk and return and appraises the performance of equity markets in the cross-section using a non-parametric procedure known as data envelopment analysis (DEA). In the appraisal, measures of risk (return) are treated as input (output) variables of the DEA...