The functional form used to represent expenditures or consumption as a function of income and household size (Engel relationship) dramatically affects estimates of elasticities of these variables. This impact also holds true when the elasticities are computed at the mean of the sample used. When...

Projections of world food demands hinge critically on the underlying functional form used to predict future demands. Simple functional forms can lead to unrealistic projections by failing to capture changes in income elasticities of demand as consumer becomes wealthier. This paper compares...

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are increasingly being used to project world food markets in order to support forward-looking policy analysis. Such projections hinge critically on the underlying functional form for representing consumer demand. Simple functional forms can lead to...

This paper presents some conventional and new measures of market, credit, and liquidity risks for government bonds. These measures are analyzed from the perspective of a sovereign's debt manager. In particular, it examines duration, convexity, M-square, skewness, kurtosis, and VaR statistics as...

This paper reviews recent advances in the specification and estimation of Bayesian Vector Autoregressive models (BVARs). After describing the Bayesian principle of estimation, we first present the methodology originally developed by Litterman (1986) and Doan et al. (1984) and review alternative...

This paper reexamines the empirical relationship between financial development and economic growth. It presents evidence based on cross-section and panel data using an updated dataset, a variety of econometric methods, and two standard measures of financial development: the level of liquid...

Building on the widely-used double-lognormal approach by Bahra (1997), this paper presents a multi-lognormal approach with restrictions to extract risk-neutral probability density functions (RNPs) for various asset classes. The contributions are twofold: first, on the technical side, the paper...