Nontraded inputs account for the lion's share of a Big Mac price (Ong 1997, Parsley and Wei 2003). Major departures from Big Mac PPP may then be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson income differences effect, as shown e.g. by Click (1996). But it has been argued that Click''s result is not robust...

Financial economists usually assess market efficiency in absolute terms. This is a shortcoming. One way of dealing with the relative efficiency of markets is to resort to the efficiency interpretation provided by algorithmic complexity theory. This paper employs such an approach in order to rank...

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.

This paper provides estimates of the elasticities of demand for the Brazilian basic plan of local fixed telephony using a cointegration model. We find a long-run price elasticity of –0.24, and an income elasticity of 0.18. These figures are line with other countries' estimates.

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.

Financial economists usually assess market efficiency in absolute terms. This is a shortcoming. One way of dealing with the relative efficiency of markets is to resort to the efficiency interpretation provided by algorithmic complexity theory. This paper employs such an approach in order to rank...

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.

Nontraded inputs account for the lion's share of a Big Mac price (Ong 1997, Parsley and Wei 2003). Major departures from Big Mac PPP may then be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson income differences effect, as shown e.g. by Click (1996). But it has been argued that Click''s result is not robust...