As U.S. Treasury securities carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, they are free of default risk. Thus, their yields are risk-free rates of return, which allows the most recently issued U.S. Treasury securities to be used as a benchmark to price other fixed-income instruments....

The paper begins with the question of whether Leamer's Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) really does "Take the Con Out of Econometrics" By analytically demonstrating that the extreme bounds are simply functions of the F-statistic for the deletion of variables from a regression, we conclude that the...

In this paper we use a structural VAR model with block exogeneity to investigate if external shocks originating from the USA played a dominant role in influencing the macroeconomic fluctuations in East Asia during the period 1978-2007. The empirical results show a dynamic effect of external...

Asia is presently the most important market for the production and consumption of natural rubber. World prices of rubber are not only subject to changes in demand, but also to speculation regarding future markets. Japan and Singapore are the major futures markets for rubber, while Thailand is...

This paper investigates regression quantiles (RQ) for unstable autoregressive models. The uniform Bahadur representation of the RQ process is obtained. The joint asymptotic distribution of the RQ process is derived in a unified manner for all types of characteristic roots on or outside the unit...

See the article in <I>Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (MATCOM)</I> (2013). Volume 93(c), pages 9-18.<P> Many macroeconomic forecasts and forecast updates like those from IMF and OECD typically involve both a model component, which is replicable, as well as intuition, which is non-replicable....</p></i>

The paper proposes a general asymmetric multifactor Wishart stochastic volatility (AMWSV) diffusion process which accommodates leverage, feedback effects and multifactor for the covariance process. The paper gives the closed-form solution for the conditional and unconditional Laplace transform...

Published in the <I>Journal of Reviews on Global Economics</I> (2013). Volume 2, pages 307-329.<P> Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents....</p></i>

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the asymmetric relationship betweenprice and implied volatility and the associated extreme quantile dependence usinglinear and non linear quantile regression approach. Our goal in this paper is todemonstrate that the relationship between the volatility and...