Mutual funds classifications, often made by rating agencies, are very common and sometimes criticized. In this work, a three-step statistical procedure for mutual funds classification is proposed. In the first step time series funds are characterized in terms of returns. In the second step, a...

Until recently, the neoclassical growth theory and the neoclassical labour market theory have independently evolved over time without communicating to each other. The neoclassical growth theory (Solow, 1956), born after the second world war, assumes full employment. On the other hand, the...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. Tourism appears to be an independent...

The problem of forecasting financial time series has received great attention in the past, from both Econometrics and Pattern Recognition researchers. In this context, most of the efforts were spent to represent and model the volatility of the financial indicators in long time series. In this...

In this paper we investigate crude oil and products price dynamics. We present a comparison among ten prices series of crude oils and fourteen price series of petroleum products, considering four distinct market areas (Mediterranean, North Western Europe, Latin America and North America) over...

Orthodox economics sees transport as a market which can be made more sustainable by improving its self-regulating capacity. To date this static approach has not been able to limit the growing demand for transport and its increasing environmental impact. Better results might be obtained by using...

The aim of this paper is to compare the forecasting performance of SETAR and GARCH models against a linear benchmark using historical data for the returns of the Japanese yen/US dollar exchange rate. The relative performance of the models is evaluated on point forecasts and on interval...

This paper aims at contributing to the growing literature on the influence of public capital to the overall productivity levels. Using a panel of 20 Italian regions over the period 1970-1995 we estimate a production function which includes as inputs - units of labour, private capital and public...

Among the determinants of the growth and convergence processes identified by the theoretical literature, human capital is certainly one of the most important. This paper offers a selective survey of the more recent contributions of the theory of human capital and growth. In particular, our aim...

Financial time series are often characterized by similar volatility structures, often represented by GARCH processes. The detection of clusters of series displaying similar behavior could be important to understand the differences in the estimated processes, without having to study and compare...