Recent advances in the measurement of volatility have utilized high frequency intraday data to produce what are generally known as realised volatility estimates. It has been shown that forecasts generated from such estimates are of positive economic value in the context of portfolio allocation....

What is the broad impact of sport participation and sport activities in a society? The first aim of this paper is tackling this crucial point by studying whether or not there is a relationship between sport participation and crime. A panel dataset have been constructed for the twenty Italian...

This study considers the influences on agents’ decisions in an international context. Using data from five seasons of European cup football matches it is found that referees favour home teams when awarding yellow and red cards. Previous research on referee decisions in national leagues has...

The unemployment rate in Australia is modelled as an asymmetric and nonlinear function of aggregate demand, productivity, real interest rates, the replacement ratio and the real exchange rate. If changes in unemployment are big, the management of of demand, real interest rates and the...

We analyze the puzzling behavior of the volatility of individual stock returns over the past few decades. The literature has provided many different explanations to the trend in volatility and this paper tests the viability of the different explanations. Virtually all current theoretical...

This paper develops a quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) procedure for estimating the parameters of multi-dimensional stochastic differential equations. The transitional density is taken to be a time-varying multivariate Gaussian where the first two moments of the distribution are approximately the...

This paper is concerned with evaluating Value-at-Risk estimates. It is well known that using only binary variables, such as whether or not there was an exception, sacrifices too much information. However, most of the specification tests (also called backtests) available in the literature, such...

This paper re-examines the calculation of the relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of competitive balance in leagues in which draws are possible outcomes. Some key conclusions emerging from the exchange between Cain and Haddock (2006) and Fort (2007) are reversed. There is no difference,...

This paper develops a new simulation-based measure of playoff uncertainty and investigates its contribution to modelling match attendance compared to other variants of playoff uncertainty in the existing literature. A model of match attendance that incorporates match uncertainty, playoff...

This paper presents a simple forecasting technique for variance covariance matrices. It relies significantly on the contribution of Chiriac and Voev (2010) who propose to forecast elements of the Cholesky decomposition which recombine to form a positive definite forecast for the variance...