This paper discusses the estimation of models of the term structure of interest rates. After reviewing the term structure models, specifically the Nelson-Siegel Model and Affine Term- Structure Model, this paper estimates the terms structure of Treasury bond yields for the United States with...

Firm-level fixed investment expenses are analysed using a large panel of US manufacturing firms from 1971 to 2007. Integrating the user cost of capital, q and accelerator theories of investment to one econometric specification, we estimate the impacts of sales growth, cash flow, the cost of...

The paper analyses the impact of the labour costs and import costs on the prices of final goods in the USA during the 1950s-1990s period. The elasticity of the final prices with respect to the import and labour price indexes is a main determinant in the go through channel affecting the prices of...

The standard vector error correction (VEC) model assumes the iid normal distribution of disturbance term in the model. This paper extends this assumption to include GARCH process. We call this model as VEC-GARCH model. However as the number of parameters in a VEC-GARCH model is large, the...

This paper evaluates if and how speculation affects the volatility of commodity futures: it distinguishes between short term and long term measures of speculation and investigates if the impact on volatility is different. Speculation is measured by means of four indexes: scalping, Working’s T,...

Options should play an important role in asset allocation. They allow for kernel spanning and provide access to additional (priced) risk factors such as stochastic volatility and negative jumps. Unfortunately, traditional methods of asset allocation (e.g. mean-variance optimization) are not...

This paper discusses the key characteristics of the U.S. financial crisis 2007-2009 and focuses on the Federal Policy Response to the lack of liquidity in the financial sector known as the “Credit Crunch”. The surprising depth of the crisis required unprecedented policy measures to be used...

This paper examines the e-learning strategies adopted by universities, from the perspective of three common objectives: widening access to educational opportunity; enhancing the quality of learning; and reducing the cost of higher education. The discussion is illustrated by drawing on case...