Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

The existing weight of evidence suggests that financial structure (the classification of a financial system as bank-based versus market-based) is irrelevant for economic growth. This contradicts the common belief that the institutional structure of a financial system matters. We re-examine this...

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises...

We propose novel nonparametric estimators for stochastic volatility and the volatility of volatility. In doing so, we relax the assumption of a constant volatility of volatility and therefore, we allow the volatility of volatility to vary over time. Our methods are exceedingly simple and far...

This paper studies the impact of stock market development on cross country relative prices (the real exchange rate). A nonlinear relationship is uncovered in the cross section: prices and the stock market increase together in the beginning; then prices fall as the stock market continues to...

Correlation matrices are ubiquitous in finance. Some key applications include portfolio construction, risk management, and factor/style analysis. Correlation matrices are usually estimated from historical empirical observations or derived from historically estimated factors. It is widely...

As long as financial markets are concerned, for many years' economists, statisticians and financial analyst have been interested in developing and testing models of stock price behaviour and their forecast. This study examines whether the Indian stock market is efficient if the stock returns...

In this paper I examine whether one can use analyst forecasts of macroeconomic variables to improve investors ex-ante allocation of wealth between stocks and bonds. Such forecasts provide a forward-looking approach which I find improves investor's information set for the myopic stock-bond...

Against the backdrop of interest rate risk in the fixed income portfolios of the financial institutions in India that arose since the first quarter of the current financial year 2008-09 the influence of monetary policy on the term structure emerged as an important issue for research purposes. In...

In the present paper an attempt has been made to estimate how political stability affects economic growth. This analysis refers to the three economic poles (EU, Japan and the United States) for the period (1998-2013). The findings of present model are in agreement with (Alberto et al., 1996; Aisen...