Applying a standard questionnaire (Lichtenstein and Fischhoff 1977) to a sample of 44 professional investors, we sought for explicit correlations between selected biological characteristics of the investors and the cognitive bias known as overconfidence. We found that both male and female...

"We examine the relationship between the US current account deficit, the international value of the dollar, and the dollar reserves of foreign central banks. The declining dollar could benefit US savers at the expense of foreign investors in the USA." Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors.

I evaluate the just launched official criterion for assessing the economics research output in Brazil, called “Qualisâ€. I compare it with the simple journal impact factors released by RePEc. Four biases are identified: (1) left-wing journals have been favored, (2) mainstream British...

We revisit the issue of comovements of emerging and developed stockmarkets, and provide a simultaneous treatment of data for the eighties and nineties. We show that while emerging markets experience greater instability in the long term than their developed counterparts, there is room for...

We make a case for the usefulness of an optimal control approach for the central banks' choice of interest rates in inflation target regimes. We illustrate it with data from selected developed and emerging countries with longest experience of inflation targeting.

We show that Marshall-Lerner condition holds for Brazilian trade balance, and discard a J-curve in the short run. We present these results using impulse-response functions in a variety of (linear and nonlinear) models, including Markov-switching, vector error-correction models.

We detected bubbles in 22 emerging stockmarkets using both standard and threshold cointegration. Eighteen stockmarkets experienced explosive bubbles (and some of them periodically collapsing bubbles as well). The remaining four markets experienced periodically collapsing bubbles only.

We put forward a technique based on cluster analysis to group stocks in spot markets according to a risk-return criterion. We show how an informed investor will make money using the cluster analysis to select stocks of major companies from North and South America.

Employing both cointegration analysis and a variety of Granger causality tests, we examine whether the Brazilian stockmarket is efficient in processing new information about public macroeconomic data (semi-strong efficiency). We find the stockmarket to be inefficient, which is in line with most...

The strong Brazilian currency between 1994 and 1998 led Brazilians to an unprecedented increase in their travels abroad. Even after the 1999 currency crisis, travel patterns did not recover to their pre-exchange rate devaluation levels. The occasional exchange rate valuation has left...