The issue of outsourcing as a form of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been widely discussed in the recent past. In this essay, I analyze what determines the outsourcing activity by looking at U. S. manufacturing industries between 1972 and 2002. I concentrate on correlation between the...

This article provides a procedure for the estimation of parametric homogeneous stochastic volatility (SV) pricing formulae based on option data. Our estimator has the advantage of being (i) based on option data, (ii) easy to implement in practice, (iii) with clear statistic properties and (iv)...

In this paper, the results of seasonal modeling of Sokoto monthly average temperature have been obtained using seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average modeling approach. Based on this seasonal modeling analysis, we conclude that, the best seasonal model among the models that are...

The paper proposes two estimation approaches for duration models that are subject to right censored observations and selection effects. Main focus is on accelerated duration models and the estimators that are of the limited information type, i.e. they are not based on a fully specified selection...

This paper examines whether economic integration favors countries' convergence into a common cone of diversification. We analyze the manufacturing specialization patterns for a sample of 19 current and potential European Union countries over the period 1963-1998, and assess the impact of...

It has become customary to estimate the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) with GMM using a large instrument set that includes lags of variables that are ad hoc to the model. Researchers have also conventionally used real unit labor cost (RULC) as the proxy for real marginal cost, even though...

Empirical support for the long-run Fisher effect, a hypothesis that a permanent change in inflation leads to an equal change in the nominal interest rate, has been hard to come by. This paper provides a plausible explanation of why past studies have been unable to find support for the long-run...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...

I perform a regression analysis to test two of the most famous heuristic rules existing in the literature about the behavior of the implied volatility surface. These rules are the sticky delta rule and the sticky strike rule. I present a new specification to test the sticky strike rule, which...