One of the main objections to applying contingent claims analysis outside the area of derivatives pricing, such as to the pricing of corporate (or sovereign) debt, has been that it is not possible to trade in the relevant state variable, e.g. the assets of a firm. Consequently, replicating...

This paper examines the characteristics of business cycles within and across thirteen countries for more than a century of observations adopting a monetary regime perspective. We search for empirical regularities of business cycle fluctuations during three monetary regimes; the classical gold...

In this paper we introduce the Smooth Permanent Surge [SPS] model. The model is an integrated non lineal moving average process with possibly unit roots in the moving average coefficients. The process nests the Stochastic Permanent Break [STOPBREAK] process by Engle and Smith (1999) and in a...

This paper demonstrates that long memory leads to spurious rejection of the linearity hypothesis, when a STAR specification constitutes the alternative.

The central bank’s optimal objective function is analyzed in a small open economy model allowing for incomplete exchange rate pass-through. The results indicate that social welfare can only be marginally improved by including an explicit exchange-rate term in the delegated objective function,...

Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several...

This paper uses daily capital flows to the Swedish bond market to analyse the relative information endowment of domestic and foreign investors. Using the standard framework of a noisy rational expectations equilibrium it is shown that foreign investors are, on average, better informed than...

This paper analyzes policies for regulating polluting firms under imperfect monitoring. The main finding is that a certain emission target is always more costly to enforce if there exists a market for emission permits than if there is none. The intuition is that a market restricts the regulatory...

This paper deals with capacity constrained price competition in a duopoly model. The model resembles that in Kreps and Scheinkman (1983), but the timing of the investment/capacity choice is endogenous. In equilibrium, one of the firms will invest to become the Stackelberg leader, although the...

A method proposed by Bertola and Svensson (1993) is used to extract expected rates of depreciation within the target zone band for four Nordic currencies 1979-1989. These are then combined with time-series of expected rates of devaluation (defined as changes in central parities of the target...