In mid-2009 Simeon Djankov, who had dealt with a variety of economic and financial crises as chief economist for finance and private sector development at the World Bank, was suddenly thrust into the job of finance minister of his native Bulgaria. For nearly four years in that post, he attended...

The linearity of the relationship between income inequality and economic development has been long questioned. While theory provides arguments for which the shape of relationship may be positive for low levels of inequality and negative for high ones, most of the empirical literature assumes a...

Does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) matter for the cross section of stock returns ? Constructing a CSR factor long irresponsible firms and short responsible ones, we show that CSR is pervasive in the cross section of the returns of portfolios sorted on size and book to market, momentum,...

This paper aims at analyzing the “industry effect” on stock market reaction to global financial crisis. This has been conducted using a sample of 4 stock markets, and covering the period from 2007 to 2011.Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated that we could accept hypotheses regarding the effects of...

We derive lower and upper bounds for the Value-at-Risk of a portfolio of losses when the marginal distributions are known and independence among (some) subgroups of the marginal components is assumed. We provide several actuarial examples showing that the newly proposed bounds strongly improve...

The Asia-Pacific region is not typically seen as one geographic or socio-economic space. Yet, 58 regional economies occupying the space of 28 million square kilometers from Turkey in the West, Russian Federation in the North, French Polynesia in the East and New Zealand in the South belong to...

A Country is a predefined territory, where people live along with the nature and other living species (Botanical, Marine, Zoological etc.…). A Nation is the same as a Country, but with registered and identified group of people as the citizens. Each living group in a nation is identified as a...

A number of problems in economics, finance, information theory, insurance, and generally in decision making under uncertainty rely on estimates of the covariance between (transformed) random variables, which can for example be losses, risks, incomes, financial returns, etc. Several avenues...