The cornerstone of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) lies with its beta. The question of whether or not beta is dead has attracted great attention from academics and practitioners in the last 50 years or so, and the debate is still ongoing. Many empirical studies have been conducted to test...

Stability indicators are essential to banks in order to identify instability caused by adverse economic circumstances or increasing risks such as customer defaults. This paper develops a novel comprehensive stability indicator (CSI) that can readily be used by individual banks, or by regulators...

The evolution by sexual selection of the male propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption contributed to the emergence of modern rates of economic growth. We develop a model in which males engage in conspicuous consumption to send an honest signal of their quality to females. Males who...

This paper studies the effects of live-in foreign domestic workers (FDWs) on children’s educational achievement using samples from two population censuses and a survey dataset. The census data shows that the incidence of express schooling is significantly higher for children who are under the...

This paper presents the inequality measures for different spatial groupings in China from 1997 to 2007. The intra-provincial inequality within each province, that is, the inequality amongst the county-level units within each province, is derived. It is found that the levels of inequality in the...

Using data on 61 oil companies from 2001-09, we examine the evolution of revenue efficiency of National Oil Companies (NOCs) and shareholder-owned oil companies (SOCs). We find that NOCs generally are less efficient than SOCs, but their efficiency increased faster over the last decade. We also...

This paper uses a descriptive statistical approach to identify longer-term patterns, or empirical regularities, in the prices of 16 prominent metals from 1950 to 2010. We also examine some related aspects of the behaviour of the corresponding volumes. Our approach is to summarise the data in the...

The term "middle income trap" has been widely used in the literature, without having been clearly dened or formally tested. We propose a statistical denition of a middle income trap and derive a simple time-series test. We nd that the concept survives a rigorous scrutiny of the data, with the...