A recent paper claims that habit formation in consumption plays an important role in current account fluctuations in selected developed countries, extending the present-value model of the current account (PVM) with consumption habits. In this paper, however, I show that the habit-forming PVM is...

In customer relationship management (CRM), ad hoc rules are often employed to judge whether customers are active in a "non-contractual" setting. For example, a customer is considered to have dropped out if he or she has not made purchase for over three months. However, for customers with a long...

The comparison in this article between companies in Japan and Sweden showes that although there are obvious historical and cultures differences between companies in the two countrys; differences in the industrialization and in modernization; differences in how sport were introduced and how it...

This paper develops a model of a trading system by using neuro fuzzy framework in order to better predict the stock index. Thirty well-known stock indexes are analyzed with the help of the model developed here. The empirical results show strong evidence of nonlinearity in the stock index by...

We shall generalize the Black-Scholes option pricing formula by incorporating stochastic interest rates. Although the existing literatures have obtained some formulae for stock options under stochastic interest rates, the closed-form solutions have been known only under the Gaussian (Merton...

In this paper, we explore the role of the legal system in economic development, focusing on its relationship to the role of private mechanisms in contract enforcement. We use long-term prefecture-level panel data that cover the early stages of industrialization and urbanization in Japan. We...

For estimating the realized volatility and covariance by using high frequency data, we introduce the Separating Information Maximum Likelihood (SIML) method when there are possibly micro-market noises. The resulting estimator is simple and it has the representation as a specific quadratic form...

In contrast to the traditional model of uncertainty, where the uncertainty is characterized by a single distribution function that a decision maker faces, the Knightian-uncertainty approach characterizes it as a set of distributions rather than a single one. Hence, learning in the context of...

Swedish labor movement had developed activities for workers' and their families' everyday life at the turn of the century. These activities consisted of various cultural factors. Most of them came from traditional folk culture or bourgeois culture. These had been blended in the labor movement...

In the past decade Japanese households have been buffeted by some big aggregate shocks. Economic growth has slowed, unemployment risk has risen, and asset prices have fallen to levels not seen since the early 1980's. These shocks have hit both households' financial and human capital. This paper...