This paper studies the reactions of commercial banks to the changes in monetary policy tools in mid-1994, when the Federal Reserve Bank altered its policy implicitly targeting the Federal Funds Rate (FFR). Prior to 1994, the FFR had affected, with a considerable lag, the Prime Rate. However,...

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

This paper explores the properties of pre-test strategies in estimating a linear Cliff-Ord-type spatial model when the researcher is unsure about the nature of the spatial dependence. More specifically, the paper explores the finite sample properties of the pre-test estimators introduced in...

We explore the relationship between financial reforms and income inequality using a panel of 29 countries over 1975-2005. We extend panel unit root tests to allow for the presence of some financial-reform covariates and further suggest an associated but novel, semi-parametric approach. Results...

Standard income inequality indices can be interpreted as a measure of welfare loss entailed in departures from equality of outcomes, for egalitarian social welfare functions defined on the distribution of outcomes. But such a welfare interpretation has been criticized for a long time on the...

To their credit, empirical legal scholars try to live up to the highest methodological standards from the social sciences. But these standards do not always match the legal research question. This paper focuses on normative legal argument based on empirical evidence. Whether there is a normative...

We present in this paper an alternative approach to determining and predicting the fluctuations in the daily prices and stock returns of a first-generation bank in the Nigerian Stock Market (NSM). The approach uses a three-state Markov to estimate the expected duration of the asset returns in...

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to estimating differentiated product demand systems that allows for products with zero sales in the data. Zeroes in demand are a common problem in differentiated product markets, but fall outside the scope of existing demand estimation techniques. We...

Although a wide array of stochastic dominance tests exist for poverty measurement and identification, they assume the income distributions have independent poverty lines or a common absolute (fixed) poverty line. We propose a stochastic dominance test for comparing income distributions up to a...