This study performs the challenging task of examining the forecastability behavior of the stock market returns for the Dow Jones Islamic Market (DJIM) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) indices, using non-parametric regressions. These indices represent different markets in terms of...

This paper analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on inflation. We develop an open economy monetary endogenous growth general equilibrium model, with financial intermediaries subjected to obligatory 'high' reserve ratio, serving as the source of financial repression. When calibrated to...

We examine the time-series relationship between housing prices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. First, temporal Granger causality tests reveal that Los Angeles housing prices cause housing prices in Las Vegas (directly) and Phoenix (indirectly). In addition, Las Vegas housing prices cause...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on ‘Financial Liberalization’, spanning more than three decades, starting from the independent contributions of McKinnon and Shaw in 1973 on this topic. In this regard, the paper revisits and evaluates the propositions of the...

This article attempts to examine whether the equity premium in the United States can be predicted from a comprehensive set of 18 economic and financial predictors over a monthly out-of-sample period of 2000:2–2011:12, using an in-sample period of 1990:2–2000:1. To do so, we consider, in...

The 2006 sudden and immense downturn in U.S. house prices sparked the 2007 global financial crisis and revived the interest about forecasting such imminent threats for economic stability. In this paper we propose a novel hybrid forecasting methodology that combines the Ensemble Empirical Mode...

Forecasting aggregate retail sales may improve portfolio investors׳ ability to predict movements in the stock prices of retail chains. This paper uses 26 (23 single and 3 combination) forecasting models to forecast South Africa׳s aggregate seasonal retail sales. We use data from...

Using forecasts of the inflation rate in South Africa, we study the rationality of forecasts and the shape of forecasters’ loss function. When we study micro-level data of individual forecasts, we find mixed evidence of an asymmetric loss function, suggesting that inflation forecasters are...

The objective of this paper is to predict, both in-sample and out-of-sample, the consumer price index (CPI) of the United States (US) economy based on monthly data covering the period of 1980:1-2013:12, using a variety of linear (random walk (RW), autoregressive (AR) and seasonally-adjusted...

There exists a huge international literature on the, so-called, Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which in turn, postulates an inverted u-shaped relationship between environmental pollutants and output. The empirical literature on EKC has mainly used test for cointegration, based on...