This article applies two novel techniques to forecast the value of US manufacturing shipments over the period 1956-2000: wavelets and support vector machines (SVM). Wavelets have become increasingly popular in the fields of economics and finance in recent years, whereas SVM has emerged as a more...

Despite impressive growth in derivatives markets around the world, there is considerable heterogeneity in the degree of development across countries. In Latin America, derivatives markets in Chile lag far behind those in Brazil and Argentina. What accounts for these differences? The analytical...

Value at Risk (VaR) is a measure of the maximum potential change in value of a portfolio of financial assets with a given probability over a given time horizon. VaR became a key measure of market risk since the Basle Committee stated that banks should be able to cover losses on their trading...

Exchange rate markets exhibit correlation in the short run, but the issue is whether such correlation lingers over long periods of time, and under extreme events (i.e., either large appreciations or depreciations). In this paper, we analyze dependence between nominal exchange rates under extreme...

In the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) applied to the free cash flow (FCF), we assume that the cost of debt is the market, unsubsidized rate. With debt at the market rate and perfect capital markets, debt only creates value in the presence of taxes through the tax shield. In some cases,...

This paper considers the existence of a bank lending channel in Chile. Toward that, we collect a data sample of nineteen banks that operated in Chile over January 1999- December 2002. In that period, banks primarily offered loans to firms in the manufacturing and the financial-services sectors...