Several empirical studies have shown the inadequacy of the standard Brownian motion (sBm) as a model of asset returns. To correct for this evidence some authors have conjectured that asset returns may be independently and identically Pareto-Lévy stable (PLs) distributed, whereas others have...

Comovements among asset prices have received a lot of attention for several reasons. For example, comovements are important in cross-hedging and cross-speculation; they determine capital allocation both domestically and in international mean-variance portfolios and also, they are useful in...

Counterfeiting is a well known world-wide phenomenon afflicting several real economies. Notwithstanding the importance of this topic, there are not many works about it in the literatute; moreover, these contributions mainly deal with counterfeiting employing a model developed in a static time...

Oil prices increased dramatically during 2004-6. Industry experts initially attributed these price increases to fundamental factors such as the rise in global demand, but also because of disruptions in the supply of oil. The price increases however were so substantial that additional factors are...

The equity premium of the S&P 500 Index is explained in this paper by several variables that can be grouped into fundamental, behavioral and macroeconomic factors. We hypothesize that the statistical significance of these variables changes across economic regimes. The three regimes we consider...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to a rethinking of the role of monetary and financial regulatory policy. It has also called into question the benefits of financial innovation and monetary policy that focuses solely on inflation and the output gap. This paper discusses financial...

In this chapter the authors seek to provide a general overview of the international markets for foreign exchange (FX) and FX derivatives as well as the theoretical relationships that tie these markets together with interest rates and central bank policies. The first section provides a brief...

We perform non-linearity tests using daily data for leading currencies that include the Australian dollar, British pound, Brazilian real, Canadian dollar, euro, Japanese yen, Mexican peso, and the Swiss franc to resolve the issue of whether these currencies are driven by fundamentals or...