In 1997 the Greek Government introduced a law by which the assessment of the students in Greek Lyceums (High Schools) changed. According to the new law the assessment of the 10th and the 11th grade students is based, for the first time, not only on their in school performance as assessed by...

Latin America faces a growing concentration of banking markets, situation that worries both the public and the media for its potential impact on competition, access to credit at competitive rates, and thus the potential impact on its economic and social development. This paper provides a brief...

This article empirically investigates the volatility spillover of stock returns from the market to disaggregated industry sectors. Seventeen sectors from the US and UK stock markets are estimated by the GARCH technique based on daily data from 1973 to 2008. The key findings are two-fold. In the...

The Pareto distribution is a heavy-tailed distribution often used in actuarial models. It is important for modeling losses in insurance claims, especially when we used it to calculate the probability of an extreme event. Traditionally, maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and we...

Investment in infrastructure such as the information and communication technology sector requires large, substantial amounts, most of which are sunk or irreversible. Uncertainty of market demand, competition, costs and public policy complicates the investment decision process. This paper...

Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the main determinants of corporate default. We employ Bayesian model averaging (BMA) techniques in order to shed light on this issue. Empirical findings suggest that the most robust determinants of corporate default are firm-specific variables such as the...

We investigate the relationship between female labour force participation and economic growth in the South Mediterranean countries with a two-step methodology of econometric exercise and general equilibrium modelling. Econometric estimations on female labour participation confirm the U-shaped...

Recently, a new test for nonlinearity and chaos was proposed, the noise titration technique. I discuss in this paper its relevance for the case of economic time series. I apply the test on two relevant datasets for which previous assessments exist, both simulated and real data. Compared to other...

There has been mixed evidence regarding the existence of rational bubbles in the foreign exchange markets. This paper introduces recently developed sequential unit root tests into the analysis of exchange rates bubbles. We find strong evidence of explosive behavior in the nominal Sterling-dollar...