This paper develops a reinvestment strategy for private equity which aims to keep its portfolio weight equal to a desired strategic allocation, while taking into account the illiquid nature of private equity. Historical simulations (1980-2005) show that our dynamic strategy is capable of...

We examine the relation between the quality of corporate governance and the value of excess cash for large European firms (FTSEurofirst 300 Index). We use Deminor ratings for Shareholder rights, Takeover defences, Disclosure and Board as proxies for the quality of corporate governance. We find...

This paper examines the effects of different corporate governance mechanisms on the cost of debt for large European firms and documents a novel interaction effect between shareholder rights and disclosure. Improved disclosure leads to a lower credit spread only if shareholder rights are low. A...

In this paper we put forward a new time series model, which describes nonlinearity and seasonality simultaneously. We discuss its representation, estimation of the parameters and inference. This seasonal STAR (SEASTAR) model is examined for its practical usefulness by applying it to 18 quarterly...

We examine the size properties of tests for causality in variance in the presence of structural breaks in volatility. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that these tests suffer from severe size distortions when such breaks are not taken into account. Pre-testing the series for...

We consider tests for sudden changes in the unconditional volatility of conditionally heteroskedastic time series based on cumulative sums of squares. When applied to the original series these tests suffer from severe size distortions, where the correct null hypothesis of no volatility change is...

Macroeconomic time series such as total unemployment or total industrial production concern data which are aggregated across regions, sectors, or age categories. In this paper we examine if forecasts for these aggregates can be improved by considering panel models for the disaggregate series. As...

In this paper we address the question whether countries on the African continent have lower average growth rates in real GDP per capita than countries in Asia and Latin America. In contrast to previous studies, we do not aggregate the data, nor do we a priori assign countries to clusters....

This article proposes a modified method for the construction of diffusion indexes in macroeconomic forecasting using principal component regres- sion. The method aims to maximize the amount of variance of the origi- nal predictor variables retained by the diffusion indexes, by matching the data...

Realized variance, being the summation of squared intra-day returns, has quickly gained popularity as a measure of daily volatility. Following Parkinson (1980) we replace each squared intra-day return by the high-low range for that period to create a novel and more efficient estimator called the...