Inter-dealer trading in US Treasury securities is almost equally divided between two electronic trading platforms that have only slight differences in terms of their relative liquidity and transparency. BrokerTec is more active in the trading of 2-, 5-, and 10-year T-notes while eSpeed has more...

The development of accounting, auditing and capital markets in China were an integral component of China's economic reforms; auditing was regarded as being critically important to achieving the desired policy objective of delivering a market economy (Yang and Yang, 1998). This article examines...

In recent years the issue of life expectancy has become of upmost importance to pension providers, insurance companies and the government bodies in the developed world. Significant and consistent improvements in mortality rates and hence life expectancy have led to unprecedented increases in the...

Microscopic simulation models are often evaluated based on visual inspection of the results. This paper presents formal econometric techniques to compare microscopic simulation (MS) models with real-life data. A related result is a methodology to compare different MS models with each other. For...

Stochastic modeling of mortality rates focuses on fitting linear models to logarithmically adjusted mortality data from the middle or late ages. Whilst this modeling enables insurers to project mortality rates and hence price mortality products it does not provide good fit for younger aged...

This paper tests a simple market fraction asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents. By selecting a set of structural parameters of the model through a systematic procedure, we show that the autocorrelations (of returns, absolute returns and squared returns) of the market fraction model...

We develop a continuous-time asset price model to capture the time series momentum documented recently. The underlying stochastic delay differential system facilitates the analysis of effects of different time horizons used by momentum trading. By studying an optimal asset allocation problem, we...

This paper examines (i) whether value-growth characteristics have more power than past performance in predicting return reversals; and (ii) whether typical rational behaviour such as incentives to delay paying capital gain taxes can better explain long-term reversals than past performance. We...

Mortality modelling for the purposes of demographic forecasting and actuarial pricing is generally done at an aggregate level using national data. Modelling at this level fails to capture the variation in mortality within country and potentially leads to a mis-specification of mortality...