This paper attempts to uncover the effects of a UK welfare-to-work programme on individual wage growth by exploiting an expansion to this welfare programme. The conventional wisdom is that such programmes trap recipients into low-wage, low-quality work - this comes from the simple argument that...

Despite an extensive body of research, the best way to model the dependence of exchange rates remains an open question. In this paper we present a new approach which employs a flexible time-varying copula model. It allows the conditional correlation between exchange rates to be both time-varying...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the properties of stochastic volatility models, and to discuss to what extent, and with regard to which models, properties of the classical exponential Brownian motion model carry over to a stochastic volatility setting. The properties of the classical...

This paper examines the use of valuation models by UK investment analysts. The study is based on, first, semi-structured interviews with 35 sell-side analysts from 10 leading investment banks and with 7 buy-side analysts from 3 asset management firms and, second, content analysis based on 98...

This paper uses bond prices to investigate how the creditworthiness of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela is influenced by global, regional and country-specific factors. Each country's distance-to-default is estimated monthly for 1994-2001, by fitting the structural model of Cathcart and...

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the short-horizon predictive ability of economic fundamentals and forward premiums on monthly exchange-rate returns in a framework that allows for volatility timing. We implement Bayesian methods for estimation and ranking of a set of empirical...

Equity carve outs, the partial listing of a corporate subsidiary, appear to be transitory arrangements, usually dissolved within a few years by either a complete sale or a buy back. Why do firms perform expensive listings just to reverse them thereafter? We interpret carve outs of a production...

We propose an empirical model for deviations from long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) that simultaneously accounts for three key features: (i) adjustment toward PPP may occur via nominal exchange rates and relative prices at different speeds; (ii) different exchange rate regimes may generate...

This paper provides a legal and economic analysis of the European Commission's recent proposals for reforming the application of VAT to financial services, with particular focus on their 'third pillar', under which firms would be allowed to opt in to taxation on exempt insurance and financial...

An endless leverage certificate (ELC) is a novel retail structured product that gives its holder the right to claim the difference between the value of an underlying security and an interest accruing financing level. An ELC ceases to exist if the underlying breaches a contractual knockout level,...