Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individuals' attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, using the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data from 26 countries this paper investigates the impact of relative income on 14 measurements of social...

During periods of market stress, electricity prices can rise dramatically. Electricity retailers cannot pass these extreme prices on to customers because of retail price regulation. Improved prediction of these price spikes, therefore, is important for risk management. This paper builds a...

Much research has investigated the differences between option implied volatilities and econometric model-based forecasts in terms of forecast accuracy and relative informational content. Implied volatility is a market determined forecast, in contrast to model-based forecasts that employ some...

Survey-based health research is in a boom phase following an increased amount of health spending in OECD countries and the interest in ageing. A general characteristic of survey-based health research is its diversity. Different studies are based on different health questions in different...

Markets in financial crisis may experience heightened sensitivity to news from abroad and they may also spread turbulence into foreign markets, creating contagion. We use a structural GARCH model to separate and measure these two parts of crisis transmission. Unobservable structural shocks are...

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Individuals are concerned about social comparisons....

Temperature-based weather derivatives are written on an index which is normally defined to be a nonlinear function of average daily temperatures. Recent empirical work has demonstrated the usefulness of simple time-series models of temperature for estimating the payoffs to these instruments....

Forecasting volatility has received a great deal of research attention. Many articles have considered the relative performance of econometric model based and option implied volatility forecasts. While many studies have found that implied volatility is the preferred approach, a number of issues...

The performance of techniques for evaluating univariate volatility forecasts are well understood. In the multivariate setting however, the efficacy of the evaluation techniques is not developed. Multivariate forecasts are often evaluated within an economic application such as portfolio...

Apesteguia and Palacios-Huerta (forthcoming) report for a sample of 129 shootouts from various seasons in ten different competitions that teams kicking first in soccer penalty shootouts win significantly more often than teams kicking second. Collecting data for the entire history of six major...