"Oppositional Analysis" - the name I give to the metaphysics presented in this volume - proposes a number of dichotomies through which one may analyze and understand systematically the structure of every level of reality. Macroeconomic theory, as well as social research, are two excellent stages...

In this paper we discuss how the forecasting performance of Bayesian VARs is affected by a number of specification choices. In the baseline case, we use a Normal-Inverted Wishart (N-IW) prior that, when combined with a (pseudo-) iterated approach, makes the analytical computation of h-step ahead...

Forecast rationality under squared error loss implies various bounds on second moments of the data across forecast horizons. For example, the mean squared forecast error should be increasing in the horizon, and the mean squared forecast should be decreasing in the horizon. We propose rationality...

Non-financial risk factors play a fundamental role in supporting the competitive position of companies in many of today's industries. Though, assessing these ambiguous factors in a valuation based on a Monte-Carlo simulation is particularly difficult. This paper presents how the fuzzy-set theory...

For Latvia with incoming into the European Union big opportunities in the international markets have opened. Paper purpose is to investigate influence of international integration processes on development of economy of Latvia. In paper various indicators of a national economy before and after...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

We test for the presence of time-varying parameters (TVP) in the long-run dynamics of energy prices for oil, natural gas and coal, within a standard class of mean-reverting models. We also propose residual-based diagnostic tests and examine out-of-sample forecasts. In-sample LR tests support the...

There is comparatively little empirical evidence regarding the impacts of cross border business cycle fluctuations on metropolitan housing markets located near international boundaries. This study examines the impacts of economic conditions in Mexico on sales of existing single-family houses in...

In this paper we present a mechanism to elicit and aggregate dispersed information. Our mechanism relies on the aggregation of intervals elicited using an interval scoring rule. We test our mechanism by eliciting beliefs about the termination times of a stochastic process in an experimental...