A popular theory of business cycles is that they are driven by animal spirits: shifts in expectations brought on by sunspots. A prominent example is Howitt and McAfee (AER, 1992). We show that this model has a unique equilibrium if there are payoff shocks of any size. This equilibrium still has...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate threshold effects in the persistence of South African aggregate inflation data. Design/methodology/approach – The conventional approach for assessing the degree of persistence within an inflation process is via its integration properties....

We extend and test two models of asset pricing that feature status-seeking through accumulation of not only financial and real assets but also human capital. We use weak-identification robust tests to confront these models with U.S. aggregate data. Contrary to previous results, we find that the...

A closed-form solution for quantity and asset-price movements in a dynamic general equilibrium model with non-state-separable preferences shows that the welfare cost of fluctuations and the equity premium can be large in such a model. But a large welfare loss from cycles does not imply a large...

Summary In a framework of a monetary asset pricing model with production the effects of monetary and fiscal policy shocks are investigated. The model is kept simple enough to generate explicit formulae for the equilibrium price functions. With money yielding liquidity services in the exchange...

This study offers some preliminary results about stock valuation in the emerging market of the United Arab Emirates. It examines the determinants of three valuation multiples in the period from 1996–2001, the price sales (PS), the price book value (PBV) and the price earnings (PE). Consistent...

Gallant and Tauchen (1996) describe an estimation technique, known as Efficient Method of Moments (EMM), that uses numerical methods to estimate parameters of a structural model. The technique uses as matching conditions (or moments, in the GMM jargon) the gradients of an auxiliary model that...

Abstract In this paper we consider the portfolio weights obtained by maximizing the expected quadratic utility function. The unknown parameters of the return process, the mean vector and the covariance matrix, are estimated by their sample counterparts. Assuming independent and multivariate...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show that multivariate t -distribution assumption provides a better description of stock return data than multivariate normality assumption. Design/methodology/approach The EM algorithm is applied to solve the statistical estimation problem almost...

Purpose The purpose of this research is to look at the effects of research and development expenditures (R&D) on value and risks of publicly traded companies by studying returns on stock exchanges of R&D-intensive economies (Republic of Korea, Finland and Israel). Design/methodology/approach...