Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

The recent financial crisis has demonstrated that a failure of Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) could seriously damage the stability of the financial system. A precise and consistent definition of a SIFI is pivotal to ensure efficient and effective regulation of the global...

This paper presents structural estimates for a bargaining model which nests the right-to-manage, the efficient wage bargaining, the seniority and the standard neoclassical labor demand model as special cases. In contrast to most existing models, our approach accounts for heterogeneous skill...

The recent availability of large data sets covering single transactions on financial markets has created a new branch of econometrics which has opened up a new door of looking at the microstructure of financial markets and its dynamics. The specific nature of transaction data such as the...

Purpose - This paper assesses the incidence of political institutions on stock market performance dynamics in Africa. Design/methodology/approach - The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Channels of democracy, polity and autocracy are...

How do government policies and institutions affect stock market performance? As stock markets grow broader and deeper in African countries, the question becomes more critical. Government quality dynamics of corruption-control, government-effectiveness, political-stability or no violence, voice &...

Financial integration among economies has the benefit of improving allocation efficiency and diversifying risk. However the recent global financial crisis, considered as the worst since the Great Depression has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

Our results uncover a so far undocumented ability of the interbank market to distinguish between banks of different quality in times of aggregate distress. We show empirical evidence that during the 2007 financial crisis the inability of some banks to roll over their interbank debt was not due...

This paper assesses the effect of political institutions on stock market performance in 14 African countries for which stock market data is available for the period 1990-2010. The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Political regime channels...