During a time when religious animosities were reaching their peak in Medieval Europe leading up to the violent crusades, Christians, Jews, and Muslims residing in close proximity in Medieval Spain experienced a period of relative peace, prosperity, and cultural exchange. This historical episode,...

Indigenous families experience substantial and multiple forms of economic burden arising from the size and structure of their families and households. Indigenous households are more likely to have more than one family in residence than other Australian households and are more likely to be...

Using a number of alternative approaches, Sichel (1994) demonstrated evidence supporting the notion that the US business cycle is best characterized as having three distinct phases, viz. contraction, followed by rapid expansion during the early stages of the recovery phase, followed by a period...

This paper is concerned with evaluating Value-at-Risk estimates. It is well known that using only binary variables, such as whether or not there was an exception, sacrifices too much information. However, most of the specification tests (also called backtests) available in the literature, such...

We compare the ability of correlation and threshold effects in a stochastic volatility model to capture the asymmetric relationship between stock returns and volatility. The parameters are estimated using maximum likelihood based on the extended Kalman filter and uses numerical integration over...

We study the ability of traditional diagnostic tests and LM and CUSUM structural break tests to detect a range of different types of breaks in GARCH models. We find that Wooldridge's (1990) robust LM tests for autocorrelation and ARCH have no power to detect structural breaks in GARCH models....

In the midst of the current financial crisis the economics profession has seen a monumental resurrection of Keynesian ideas. The debate, which Keynes started back in the 1930s, is being picked up again, not where it left off, but in exactly the same place it started. While Keynesian theories...

The economics profession not only failed to predict the recent financial crisis, but has been struggling in its aftermath to reach a consensus on the cause(s) of the crisis. While competing narratives are being offered and evaluated, the narrow scope of the debate on strictly technical aspects...