Passive investment strategies basically aim to replicate an underlying benchmark. Thereby, the management usually selects a subset of stocks being employed in the optimization procedure. Apart from the optimization procedure, the stock selection approach determines the stock portfolios's...

Even though a random walk process is from a statistical point of view not predictable, some movements can be correlated with specific events concerning other variables. Then, predictable patterns may arise being dependent on this joint event. There is evidence given that equity price busts being...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the merits of using the Value At Risk method in estimating the risk associated with investments in metallurgical sector companies. The paper presents how to construct the model, various methods of its estimation and their advantages and disadvantages. In the...

Uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP) provides a crucial theoretical concept for many models in international finance and international monetary economics. Using quarterly data span from 1998Q1 to 2010Q3, we run conventional regressions (OLS) and simple GARCH analysis on UIRP for the case of...

Even though correlations between different economies' stock markets have empirically increased over time, it would have been advantageously to invest in developing countries' stock markets such as the Indian stock market, instead of investing in the US-stock market when considering the overall...

In the early days of nationalization, it seemed axiomatic that price and quality standards could be better managed by State Owned Enterprises (SOE). Subsequent experience, however demonstrates that public ownership and control are different as the challenges of imposing effective public...

This paper extends previous studies in modeling and estimating energy demand functions for both gasoline and kerosene petroleum products for Nigeria from 1977 to 2008. In contrast to earlier studies on Nigeria and other developing countries, this study specifically tests for the possibility of...

In this paper we extend the Stock and Watson’s (Leading economic indicators, new approaches and forecasting records, 1991) single-index dynamic factor model in an econometric framework that has the advantage of combining information from real and financial indicators published at different...

This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronisation both within them and between them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they...

We present a medium-scale dynamic factor model to estimate and forecast the rate of growth of the Spanish economy in the very short term. The intermediate size of the model overcomes the serious specification problems associated with large scale-models and the implicit loss of information of...