An important puzzle in international macroeconomics is the exchange rate disconnect puzzle. Based on recent empirical literature by Mussa (1986), Baxter and Stockman (1989), and Flood and Rose (1995), high exchange rate volatility under floating rates appear not to be related to the high...

The Australian Trade Deficit (TD) has been increasing in the past 50 years, and this deficit has become more significant in the last few decades. This rising TD level in Australia has brought the national debt level to a new height, making this country one of the world?s highest debt-ridden...

With the rapid development of the global economy, intellectual capital has become a critical driver of a business's sustainability. The essential difference between companies operating in the 'old' and the 'new' economy is that, where value in the past was created within industrial sectors such...

A large body of the literature argues that the soundness of financial system is largely determined by the economic and institutional environment in which the financial system works. Drawing on this theoretical underpinning, research in this thesis models financial soundness indicators (FSIs)...

Maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters of stochastic differential equations are consistent and asymptotically efficient, but unfortunately difficult to obtain if a closed-form expression for the transitional probability density function of the process is not available. As a result, a...

We explore the empirical usefulness of conditional coskewness to explain the cross-section of equity returns. We find that coskewness is an important determinant of the returns to equity, and that the pricing relationship varies through time. In particular we find that when the conditional...

We consider complexity penalization methods for model selection. These methods aim to choose a model to optimally trade off estimation and approximation errors by minimizing the sum of an empirical risk term and a complexity penalty. It is well known that if we use a bound on the maximal...