Substituting crude oil exports with value-added petrochemical products is one of the main strategies for policy makers in oil-driven economies to isolating the real sectors of economy from oil price volatility. This policy inclination has led to a body of literature in energy economics in recent...

In this paper we consider a variety of procedures for numerical statistical inference in the family of univariate and multivariate stable distributions. In connection with univariate distributions (i) we provide approximations by finite location-scale mixtures and (ii) versions of approximate...

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is...

In this paper we discuss how the forecasting performance of Bayesian VARs is affected by a number of specification choices. In the baseline case, we use a Normal-Inverted Wishart (N-IW) prior that, when combined with a (pseudo-) iterated approach, makes the analytical computation of h-step ahead...

We propose estimators for the parameters of a linear median regression without any assumption on the shape of the error distribution including no condition on the existence of moments allowing for heterogeneity (or heteroskedasticity) of unknown form, noncontinuous distributions, and very...

We study two linear estimators for stationary invertible VARMA models in echelon form to achieve identification (model parameter unicity) with known Kronecker indices. Such linear estimators are much simpler to compute than Gaussian maximum-likelihood estimators often proposed for such models,...

During the last decades, banks off-balance sheet (OBS) activities (e.g. securitization, trading and fee-based activities) have greatly contributed to the increase in bank risk. However, the standard financial indicators such as the Value-at-Risk and the accounting leverage, exclude these...

This paper analyses the effect of public and private health expenditures on the achievement of health-related MDGs. It finds that three quarters of the variation of health-related MDG indicators can be explained by public and private health expenditure per capita when controlling for levels of...

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the need to consider more realistic risk models for derivative products has received renewed attention. We introduce a dynamic model for the pricing of European-style options with various attractive features such as a mixture of heavy-tails and...