The integration and development of financial markets is an important issue because it can result in economic growth via increasing exchange and more efficient allocation of scarce resources. It is also important for defining and conducting appropriate policies to counteract adverse spill-over...

This paper utilizes a new contagion test based on case-resampling bootstrap technique to investigate whether there is any contagion effect in the interaction of the US real estate market with those of Australia, Japan and the UK arising out of the recent US real estate crisis or subprime crisis....

This paper introduces asymmetric impulse response functions and asymmetric variance decompositions. It is shown how the underlying variables can be transformed into cumulative positive and negative changes in order to estimate the impulses to an asymmetric innovation. An application is provided...

This paper deals with the issue of whether the Government complies with its budget constraint for the case of Sweden during the period 1963-2000 using quarterly data. It is found that government spending and government revenue are nonstationary (integrated) but cointegrated. A random coefficient...

The minimum variance hedge ratio is widely used by investors to immunize against the price risk. This hedge ratio is usually assumed to be constant across time by practitioners, which might be too restrictive assumption because the optimal hedge ratio might vary across time. In this paper we put...

One of the most important stylized facts in finance is that stock index returns are inversely related to volatility. The theoretical rationale behind the proposition is still controversial. The causal relationship between returns and volatility is investigated in the US stock market over the...

We investigate the extent by which real estate markets are integrated with the world market. We apply a case-wise bootstrap analysis — a method that is robust to non-normality and increased volatility that characterises financial markets, especially during periods of distress. We also take...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between tourism activity and economic performance for G-7 countries. This paper attempts to answer two questions. Firstly, it will look at whether economic growth causes increased tourism activity for Italy, Canada, Japan, France, the UK, the...

Option pricing is an integral part of modern financial risk management. The well-known Black and Scholes (1973) formula is commonly used for this purpose. This paper is an attempt to extend their work to a situation in which the unconditional volatility of the original asset is increasing during...