Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

Ray Fair is one of my favorite econometricians. He has an excellent website, fairmodel.econ.yale.edu, where he freely shares his models. He writes clearly and his methods are reported in detail. He is concerned with the proper use of econometric methods. For example, he has long been opposed to...

The M3-Competition continues to improve the design of forecasting competitions: It examines more series than any previous competition, improves error analyses. and includes commercial forecasting programs as competitors. To judge where to go from here, I step back to look at the M-Competitions...

Those making environmental decisions must not only characterize the present, they must also forecast the future. They must do so for at least two reasons. First, if a no-action alternative is pursued, they must consider whether current trends will be favorable or unfavorable in the future....

By analyzing fictitious options - a unique approach - significant mispricing due to the formula of Black and Scholes can be shown systematically and independent from market distortion. Even options based on fictitious, lognormally distributed courses are not valued properly. According to the Law...

The paper assesses the usefulness of selective hedging strategies when combined with forecast techniques in the live hog contract. The use of routine futures and options hedging is not attractive relative to a cash-only strategy. However, forecasting and hedging can contribute to price risk...

This paper gives an overview of some issues related to market aluation, focusing on the developments on the New York equity markets. The 42.4 p.c. fall in the S&P 500 price index between 24 March 2000 - when it reached its all-time high - and 31 December 2002 is situated in a very long term...

The aim of this paper is to develop and apply Neural Network (NN) models in order to forecast regional employment patterns in Germany. NNs are statistical tools based on learning algorithms with a distribution over a large amount of quantitative data. NNs are increasingly deployed in the social...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of GARCH’s models used with agricultural commodities data. We compare different possible sources of forecasting improvement, using various statistical distributions and models. We have chosen to confine our analysis on four indices which are the...

Recently, the continuous double auction, i.e. the trading mechanism used in the majority of the financial markets, is the subject of an extensive study. In the present paper, a model of the continuous double auction with the completely random flow of the limit orders is studied. The main result...