In recent years, the government, of African Countries has assumed major responsibilities for economic reforms and growth. In attempting to describe their economies, economists (policymakers) in many African Countries have applied certain models that are by now widely known: Linear programming...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

The paper provides a careful, analytical account of Trygve Haavelmo's unsystematic, but important, use of the analogy between controlled experiments common in the natural sciences and econometric techniques. The experimental analogy forms the linchpin of the methodology for passive observation...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

From the early 1960s onwards, Arnold Zellner has been publishing papers in the areas of statistical theory, econometric applications and macroeconomic modelling. This conversation canvasses Zellner's transition from physics to economics, the reason for the renewal of interest in Bayes's theorem...

Traditional portfolio optimization models specify placement of capital as rather irrevocably and fully at risk through investment horizon(s) or continuously. Under this constraint, asset class allocation typically serves as primary mode of diversification, pursuing risk moderation by seeking to...

We give a set of identifying conditions for simultaneous equation systems (SES) with heteroskedasticity in the framework of the Gaussian quasi maximum likelihood (QML) approach. Our conditions rely on the presence of heteroskedasticity rather than exclusion restrictions. The QML estimators are...

We give a set of identifying conditions for simultaneous equation systems (SES) with heteroskedasticity in the framework of the Gaussian quasi maximum likelihood (QML) approach. Our conditions rely on the presence of heteroskedasticity rather than exclusion restrictions. The QML estimators are...

Hedging of illiquid financial instruments is carried out with liquid instruments that, as a rule, have simpler payoff functions. For example, hedging of Asian or long-dated put options is carried out with vanilla puts, hedging of Bermuda swaptions is done with vanilla swaptions, etc. This kind...

This paper examines the rise of the VAR (Vector AutoRegressive) approach from a historical perspective. It shows that the VAR approach arises from a fusion of the Cowles Commission tradition and time series statistical methods, catalysed by the rational expectations (RE) movement, that the...