Between June 1998 and March 2006, the price index of apartment housing in Seoul, Republic of Korea, more than doubled, while fundamentals such as gross domestic product, wage, and population increased by less than 35%. This study examines the role of a rational speculative bubble in this price...

The determinants of the total number of bets placed on games from three on-line sports books are analyzed for the 2008‐9 NCAA basketball season. Betting volume depends on television coverage, temporal factors, the quality of the teams, and the expected closeness of the contest. Our results...

By using an existing and a new convergence measure, this paper assesses whether bank loan and bond interest rates are converging for the non-financial corporate sector across the euro area. Whilst we find evidence for complete bond market integration, the market for bank loans remains segmented,...

In the electricity sector, most of the trades are still done in the OTC market without direct mitigation of credit risk. Newer discussions fuelled by the European Commission (EUCOM 2009a,b) show that there is a political will to enforce a stronger collateralization policy on all European...

This paper investigates the risk-return relationship in determination of housing asset pricing. In so doing, the paper evaluates behavioral hypotheses advanced by Case and Shiller (1988, 2002, 2009) in studies of boom and post-boom housing markets. The paper specifies and tests a housing asset...

This paper examines the volatility and covariance dynamics of cash and futures contracts that underlie the Optimal Hedge Ratio (OHR) across different hedging time horizons. We examine whether hedge ratios calculated over a short term hedging horizon can be scaled and successfully applied to...

Risk aversion is a key element of utility maximizing hedge strategies; however, it has typically been assigned an arbitrary value in the literature. This paper instead applies a GARCH-in-Mean (GARCH-M) model to estimate a time-varying measure of risk aversion that is based on the observed risk...

The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the key policy instrument of the European Commission’s Climate Change Program aimed at reducing green- house gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels by 2012. A critically important element of the EU ETS is the establishment of a...

Every month the commercial banks in Iceland publish their inflation forecast for the coming month. This paper examines how accurate these forecasts were from 2000 to 2006. Most of the forecasts have similar accuracy where the inflation rate in the month in question is underestimated by 2 to 6...

We build a model in which asset prices are expectationally driven and agents forecast future prices hinging on a combination of fundamental value, trend and inertia. The model has a unique steady state and we investigate its stability. In particular the amount of behavioural heterogeneity in the...