The 2006 sudden and immense downturn in U.S. House Prices sparked the 2007 global financial crisis and revived the interest about forecasting such imminent threats for economic stability. In this paper we propose a novel hybrid forecasting methodology that combines the Ensemble Empirical Mode...

In this paper, we investigate the forecasting ability of the yield curve in terms of the U.S. real GDP cycle. More specifically, within a Machine Learning (ML) framework, we use data from a variety of short (treasury bills) and long term interest rates (bonds) for the period from 1976:Q3 to...

In this paper we assess if the financial market liberalization introduced in the beginning of the 1990s in Greece has changed the degree of market development (efficiency) by studying time-varying global Hurst exponents. Our results suggest that changes in financial market liberalization have...

In recent years much attention is being paid to teh issue of taxation in Canada. Many economists, politicians, and the public believe taht the tax burden is becoming unbearable. In order to argue in this, one needs to know how taxation distorts the output and income in the Canadian economy. The...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of the policies and procedures towards economic convergence between the countries that participated in the European Exchange Mechanism I and which are now members states of the Eurozone. The question posed is whether the introduction of...

Several studies have established the predictive power of the yield curve in terms of real economic activity. In this paper we use data for a variety of E.U. countries: both EMU (Germany, France, Italy) and non-EMU members (Sweden and the U.K.). The data used range from 1991:Q1 to 2009:Q1. For...

In this paper we examine the predictability power of long term risk premium over Housing prices in U.S.A. of a period of 19 years (1991-2009). For reasons that are cited clearly in the text, the interest rate risk premium is preferred over yield curve. Under a probit framework, it is tested...

Several studies have established the predictive power of the yield curve, i.e.: the difference between long and short term bond rates, in terms of real economic activity, for the U.S. and various European countries. In this paper we use monthly data of the industrial production index of the...