Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries' macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the financial reform index developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

This paper examines whether trade relationships facilitate resolution of international environmental spillovers. Trade might promote cooperation by providing opportunities for implicit side payments, allowing linkage between nvironmental and trade concessions, providing direct leverage over...

Transboundary spillovers may degrade environmental quality if countries free ride. This paper examines the extent of such degradation in water quality in international rivers. Using data from river monitoring stations in the UN's Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS), it compares...

We examine what are common factors that determine systematic credit risk and estimate and interpret the common risk factors. We also compare the contributions of common factors in explaining the changes of credit default swap (CDS) spreads during the pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis period....

The present study addresses the economic interpretation of stock market volatility. We argue that its character is inherently ambivalent, being considered as an indicator of either information flow or uncertainty.We discriminate between these views by measuring the fraction of price changes that...

Recently the topic of global warming has become very popular. The literature has concentrated its attention on the evidence of such effect, either by detecting regime shifts or change points in time series. The majority of these methods are designed to find shifts in mean, but only few can do...

Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...