Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the area of privately owned forest plantations in Ireland. This has been largely driven by grant aid from the government. These forests are significant carbon sinks and as such are delivering added benefit to the country by contributing to greenhouse...

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in decision support has become vital for financial services companies to remain competitive. Appraisal of AI/ML has largely focused on prediction accuracy. We argue the need to look beyond accuracy as the sole determinant for...

The difficulty of beating the random walk in forecasting spot foreign exchange rates is well documented, with the restricted VECM of Clarida and Taylor (1997) providing the primary challenge. We seek to extract the informational content of the forward rate term structure through the...

We utilise functional time series (FTS) techniques to characterise and forecast implied volatility in foreign exchange markets. In particular, we examine the daily implied volatility curves of FX options, namely; EUR-USD, EUR-GBP, and EUR-JPY. Based on existing techniques in the literature, the...

Within the field of empirical finance, the econometric analysis of markets commonly suffers from the well established problem of data snooping bias, whereby there is a likelihood that statistically significant results may be identified by pure random chance alone. This is the multiple...

Insights are offered into the interactions of EUA and CER emissions prices with key energy markets across the EU. A wide range of regional gas and power markets, in addition to global oil markets, are considered. Power prices are broken down by base, peak and off-peak to account for regional...

As the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) prepares for the post-2012 Phase III period that runs to 2020, a timely assessment of European Union Allowance (EUA) and Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) price interactions over the Phase II period is presented. Vector autoregression and...

Quantitative trading in oil based markets are investigated over 2003-2010, with focus on WTI, Brent, heating oil and gas oil. A total of 861 spreads are considered. A novel optimal statistical arbitrage trading model is applied, with generalised stepwise procedures controlling for data snooping...