short run exchange rate uncertainty in latin america this paper to obtain an ex ante measure of exchange rate uncertainty in 11 latin american countries as a preliminary issue the purchasing power parity ppp condition is tested using engle and granger two step procedure and johansen method the argument is that exchange rate uncertainty could be lower if ppp holds in the long run the expected exchange rate uncertainty is estimated according to an extended version of the autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic arch model the results show that the arch adjusment produces more efficient estimates in seven countries and that the acceptance of ppp has little effect on exchange rate uncertainty

evidence of nonlinearity in daily stock returns this article applies a newly developed statistical technique to time series of daily rates of return of 15 common stocks the technique involves estimating the bispectrum of the observed time series the bispectrum is defined as the double fourier transform of the third order cumulant function if the process generating rates of return is linear with independent innovations then the skewness of the bispectrum will be constant the article describes a test that can detect nonconstant skewness in the bispectrum hence if the test rejects constant skewness a nonlinear process is implied as a consequence the test can distinguish between white noise and purely random noise the results suggest that daily stock returns are generated by a nonlinear process

answering the skeptics yes standard volatility models do provide accurate forecasts a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the temporal dependencies in financial market volatility using arch and stochastic volatility models while most of these studies have documented highly significant in sample parameter estimates and pronounced intertemporal volatility persistence traditional ex post forecast evaluation criteria suggest that the models provide seemingly poor volatility forecasts contrary to this contention we show that volatility models produce strikingly accurate interdaily forecasts for the latent volatility factor that would be of interest in most financial applications new methods for improved ex post interdaily volatility measurements based on high frequency intradaily data are also discussed

credible spatial preemption it is often argued that incumbent firms may deter entry by preemptive investment in new goods we show that these conclusions are reversed when multiproduct incumbentfirms may exit in response to entry once entrants are in an industry an incumbent will often want to withdraw some goods to prevent competition with the entrant from reducing profits on other goods such a reaction makes entry more attractive to a potential entrant the equilibrium industry structure is less likely to be monopolistic as the goods are better substitutes as exit costs are low and as the competition between producers of the same good is more intense

income inequality and health lessons from a refugee residential assignment program this paper examines the effect of income inequality on health for a group of particularly disadvantaged individuals refugees our analysis draws on longitudinal hospitalization records coupled with a settlement policy where swedish authorities assigned newly arrived refugees to their first area of residence the policy was implemented in a way that provides a source of plausibly random variation in initial location the results reveal no statistically significant effect of income inequality on the risk of being hospitalized this finding holds also for most population subgroups and when separating between different types of diagnoses our estimates are precise enough to rule out large effects of income inequality on health

models of stock returns a comparison in this paper a discrete mixture of normal distributions is proposed to explain the observed significant kurtosis fat tails and significant positive skewness in the distribution of daily rates of returns for a sample of common stocks and indexes stationarity tests on the parameter estimates of this discrete mixture of normal distributions model revealed significant differences in the mean estimates that can explain the observed skewness and significant differences in the variance estimates that can explain the observed kurtosis an alternative explanation for the observed fat tails is the symmetric student model the result of a comparison between the models is that the discrete mixture of normal distributions model has substantially more descriptive validity than the student model for many years both financial economists and statisticians have been concerned with the description of stock market returns the form of the distribution of stock returns is a crucial assumption for mean variance portfolio theory theoretical models of capital asset prices and the prices of contingent claims for example understanding the behavior of the variance is essential to option pricing models empirical tests of asset pricing models and the efficient markets hypothesis draw statistical inferences that are also conditional on distributional assumptions the most convenient assumption for financial theory and empirical methods is that the distribution of security rates of return be multivariate normal with parameters that are stationary over time since the normal distribution is stable under addition any arbitrary portfolio of stocks will also be normally distributed with the additional assumption of risk aversion mean variance theory follows furthermore the assumptions of normality and parameter stationarity are required for most of the econometric techniques typically used in empirical research tests of the normality hypothesis on the daily returns of the dow jones industrial stocks by fama 121 revealed more kurtosis fatter tails than that predicted from a sample of independent and identically distributed normal variates fama concluded from this evidence that the distribution of price changes conforms better to the stable paretian distribution with characteristic exponent

marriage meets the joneses relative income identity and marital status abstract this paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage accounting flexibly for absolute income the ratio between a man s income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status but only for low income men relative income affects marriage even among those living with a partner a 10 percent higher reference group income is associated with a 2 percent reduction in marriage we propose an identity model to explain the results

evaluating interval forecasts a complete theory for evaluating interval forecasts has not been worked out to date most of the literature implicitly assumes homoskedastic errors even when this is clearly violated and proceed by merely testing for correct unconditional coverage consequently i set out to build a consistent framework for conditional interval forecast evaluation which is crucial when higher order moment dynamics are present the new methodology is demonstrated in an application to the exchange rate forecasting procedures advocated in risk management

assessing the impact of the exchange rate and its volatility on canadian pork and live swine exports to the united states and japan a model of a representative canadian pork exporter is developed to examine the impacts of the exchange rate and its volatility on pork and live swine exports the pork export supply equation is expressed as a function of the expected level of real exchange rate and a time varying variance of real exchange rate an ar p model is used to represent the expected real exchange rate and a garch p q model is used to generate the time varying variance the same model is used to examine the sensitivity of pork exports to japan from canada the united states and denmark the parameters of all pork and live swine export equations have theoretically consistent signs and many are significant that is the domestic price in the exporting country has a negative effect on exports because it is a major input price in the exporter s cost function while the price in the market of destination has a positive effect the level of the exchange rate has a positive impact on pork exports while the volatility of the exchange rate has a negative impact most of the volatility parameters are not significant

international evidence on crude oil price dynamics applications of arima garch models abstract we examine the usefulness of several arima garch models for modeling and forecasting the conditional mean and volatility of weekly crude oil spot prices in eleven international markets over the 1 2 1997 10 3 2009 period in particular we investigate the out of sample forecasting performance of four volatility models garch egarch and aparch and figarch over january 2009 to october 2009 forecasting results are somewhat mixed but in most cases the aparch model outperforms the others also conditional standard deviation captures the volatility in oil returns better than the traditional conditional variance finally shocks to conditional volatility dissipate at an exponential rate which is consistent with the covariance stationary garch models than the slow hyperbolic rate implied by the figarch alternative

volatility forecasting with range based egarch models we provide a simple yet highly effective framework for forecasting return volatility by combining exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models with data on the range using standard and poor s 500 index data for 1983 2004 we demonstrate the importance of a long memory specification based on either a two factor structure or fractional integration that allows for some asymmetry between market returns and volatility innovations out of sample forecasts reinforce the value of both this specification and the use of range data in the estimation we find substantial forecastability of volatility as far as 1 year from the end of the estimation period contradicting the return based conclusions of west and cho and of christoffersen and diebold that predicting volatility is possible only for short horizons

rolling sampled parameters of arch and levy stable models in this paper an asymmetric autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model and a levy stable distribution are applied to some well known financial indices dax30 ftse20 ftse100 and sp500 using a rolling sample of constant size in order to investigate whether the values of the estimated parameters of the models change over time although there are changes in the estimated parameters reflecting that structural properties and trading behaviour alter over time the arch model adequately forecasts the one day ahead volatility a simulation study is run to investigate whether the time variant attitude holds in the case of a generated arch data process revealing that even in that case the rolling sampled parameters are time varying

dynamic conditional score models a review of their applications abstractin this paper applications of dynamic conditional score dcs models are reviewed and those models are discussed in relation to classical time series models from the literature dcs models

common persistence in conditional variances since the introduction of the autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic arch model in engle 1982 numerous applications of this modeling strategy have already appeared a common finding in many of these studies with high frequency financial or monetary data concerns the presence of an approximate unit root in the autoregressive polynomial in the univariate time series representation for the conditional second order moments of the process as in the so called integrated generalized arch igarch class of models proposed in engle and bollerslev 1986 in the igarch models shocks to the conditional variance are persistent in the sense that they remain important for forecasts of all horizons this idea is readily extended to a multivariate framework even though many time series may exhibit persistence in variance it is likely that several different variables share the same common long run component in that situation the variables are naturally defined to be co persistent in variance and the co persistent linear combination is interpretable as a long run relationship conditions for co persistence to occur in the multivariate linear garch model are presented these conditions parallel the conditions for linear co integration in the mean as developed by engle and granger 1987 the presence of co persistence has important implications for asset pricing relationships and in optimal portfolio allocation decisions an empirical example relating to the time series properties of nominal u s dollar exchange rates for the deutschemark and the british pound provides a simple illustration of the ideas

normal mixture diffusion with uncertain volatility modelling short and long term smile effects this paper introduces a parameterization of the normal mixture diffusion nmd local volatility model that captures only a short term smile effect and then extends the model so that it also captures a long term smile effect we focus on the binomial nmd parameterization so called because it is based on simple and intuitive assumptions that imply the mixing law for the normal mixture log price density is binomial with more than two possible states for volatility the general parameterization is related to the multinomial mixing law in this parsimonious class of complete market models option pricing and hedging is straightforward since model prices and deltas are simple weighted averages of black scholes prices and deltas but they only capture a short term smile effect where leptokurtosis in the log price density decreases with term in accordance with the stylised facts of econometric analysis on ex post returns of different frequencies and the central limit theorem however the last part of the paper shows that longer term smile effects that arise from uncertainty in the local volatility surface can be modeled by a natural extension of the binomial nmd parameterization results are illustrated by calibrating the model to several euro us dollar currency option smile surfaces

tariffs versus quotas with strategic investment the relative efficiency of tariffs versus quotas is analyzed in a cournot oligopoly with strategic investment introducing quota licence fees to neutralize the international distributional effect when such licence fees remove quota rents from foreign firms then for the case of constrained entry with a sufficiently large number of firms quotas frequently hold a welfare advantage since tariffs relatively aggravate the inefficiency from overinvestment in the case of free entry and exit however tariffs hold a welfare advantage since there is greater benefit of increasing returns to scale to the economy by avoidance of excessive entry of firms

the statistical properties of daily foreign exchange rates 1974 1983 abstract this paper examines the statistical properties of daily rates of change of five foreign currencies from 1974 to 1983 the main purpose is to discriminate between two competing explanations for the observed heavy tails of the distribution that the data are independently drawn from a heavy tail distribution which remains fixed over time and that the data come from distributions which vary over time evidence point to the rejection of the first hypothesis further investigations show that the rejection can be attributed to changing means and variances in the data which can be described by a simple statistical model

var methods for the dynamic impawn rate of steel in inventory financing under autocorrelative return abstract this paper proposes the way of setting the dynamic impawn rate by dividing the impawn periods into different risk windows in an efficient financial market the return is hypothetically independent while in a pledged inventory market where spot transactions predominate the return is auto correlative therefore the key to setting the impawn rate is to predict the long term risk in this experiment using the database of spot steel we established a model with the formula ar 1 garch 1 1 ged forecasting the var of steel during the different risk windows in the impawn period through a method of out of sample and got the impawn rate according with the risk exposure of banks the results of our experiment indicated that the introduction of coefficient k into the model can significantly improve bank risk coverage and reduce its efficiency loss besides the impawn rate obtained by the model correlates positively with the lowest price in the future risk windows

income inequality and health status in the united states evidence from the current population survey several recent studies have identified an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes this has been taken to be evidence that inequality is detrimental to individual health we use data from the 1995 99 march current population survey to examine the effect of income inequality on individual health status for both the general population and those individuals in poverty we find no consistent association between income inequality and individual health status our results contradict recent claims that the psychosocial effects of income inequality have dramatic consequences for individual health outcomes

market timing with option implied distributions a forward looking approach we address the empirical implementation of the static asset allocation problem by developing a forward looking approach that uses information from market option prices to this end we extract constant maturity s p 500 implied distributions and transform them to the corresponding risk adjusted ones then we form optimal portfolios consisting of a risky and a risk free asset and evaluate their out of sample performance we find that the use of risk adjusted implied distributions times the market and makes the investor better off than if she uses historical returns distributions to calculate her optimal strategy the results hold under a number of evaluation metrics and utility functions and carry through even when transaction costs are taken into account not surprisingly the reported market timing ability deteriorated during the recent subprime crisis an extension of the approach to a dynamic asset allocation setting is also presented this paper was accepted by wei xiong finance

a class of nonlinear arch models a class of nonlinear arch models is suggested the proposed class encompasses several functional forms for arch which have been put forth in the literature a lagrange multiplier test is developed to test engle s arch specification against the wider class of models this test provides an easily computed diagnostic check of the adequacy of an arch model after it has been estimated the theory is applied to a number of weekly exchange rate series and we find strong evidence of nonlinear arch

a new pearson type qmle for conditionally heteroscedastic models this article proposes a novel pearson type quasi maximum likelihood estimator qmle of garch p q models unlike the existing gaussian qmle laplacian qmle generalized non gaussian qmle or lad estimator our pearsonian qmle pqmle captures not just the heavy tailed but also the skewed innovations under strict stationarity and some weak moment conditions the strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the pqmle are obtained with no further efforts the pqmle can be applied to other conditionally heteroscedastic models a simulation study is carried out to assess the performance of the pqmle two applications to four major stock indexes and two exchange rates further highlight the importance of our new method heavy tailed and skewed innovations are often observed together in practice and the pqmle now gives us a systematic way to capture these two coexisting features

competition of firms discriminatory pricing and location1 two costlessly mobile firms are to be located in a market region a subset of the plane the firms compete by setting locations and delivered price schedules to study this competitive stiuation an appropriate extensive form game is defined along with an appropri ate noncooperative solution concept existence and general properties of the equilibrium are demonstrated among the results are each firm increases its profit by locating so as to decrease total cost to both firms of serving the market firms will never locate coinciden tally if they have identical production costs and transport cost rates or if these are different and the firms are located in a circular market region having a uniform demand distribution this paper studies competition between two profit maximizing firms in space who are costlessly mobile and may discriminate in price we will allow the firms to set locations and delivered price schedules and we will be concerned with the existence and properties of equilibria in location and price starting with hotelling 9 the spatial competition literature has focused on location on bounded linear markets by two or more firms hotelling assumed identical firms that produced a single good with constant cost of production and considered consumers to be uniformly distributed and to have inelastic demand he also assumed that the consumers pay transport cost and purchase the good from the cheapest source hotelling claimed that a nash equilibrium in locations for the two firm market existed and yielded back to back locations at the center of the market many authors most recently d aspremont gabszewicz and thisse 2 have noted that an equilbrium in prices and location does not exist for hotelling s model however if the firms employ identical exogeneously specified prices hotelling s conclusions hold subsequent work by smithies 14 hartwick and hartwick 7 and eaton 3 claimed to show that a nash equi librium in f o b prices and locations can exist in markets with a uniform distribu tion of consumers each of whom have identical elastic demand functions for the two and three firm problems the work of d aspremont et al casts doubt on these conclusions without the adoption of restrictive conditions our work contrasts with these works and related research which has dealt with linear markets with uniform distributions of customers and with identical firms our work will involve markets that are subsets of the plane having nonuniform distributions of customers our firms will be allowed to be different that is have differences in production and transport costs however the fundamental difference in our approach is that our firms will set discriminatory prices and not price f o b in many ways our work will represent the discriminatory pricing

conditional var estimation using pearson s type iv distribution abstract this paper presents a new value at risk var estimation model for equity returns time series and tests it extensively on stock indices of 14 countries two most important stylized facts of such series are volatility clustering and non normality as a result of fat tails of the return distribution while volatility clustering has been extensively studied using the garch model and its various extensions the phenomenon of non normality has not been comprehensively explored at least in the context of var estimation a combination of extreme value theory evt and garch has been explored to analyze financial data showing non normal behavior this paper proposes a combination of the pearson s type iv distribution and the garch 1 1 approach to furnish a new method with superior predictive abilities the approach is back tested for the entire sample as well as for a holdout sample using rolling windows

sensitivity of the bank stock returns distribution to changes in the level and volatility of interest rate a garch m model abstract the objective of this paper is to employ the generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic in the mean garch m methodology to investigate the effect of interest rate and its volatility on the bank stock return generation process this framework discards the restrictive assumptions of linearity independence and constant conditional variance in modeling bank stock returns the model presented here allows for shifts in the volatility equation in response to the changes in monetary policy regime in 1979 and 1982 to be estimated arch garch and volatility feed back effects are found to be significant interest rate and interest rate volatility are found to directly impact the first and the second moments of the bank stock returns distribution respectively the latter also affects the risk premia indirectly the degree of persistence in shocks is substantial for all the three bank portfolios and sensitive to the nature of the bank portfolio and the prevailing monetary policy regime

do macro economic news announcements affect the volatility of foreign exchange rates some evidence from australia this paper investigates the role of australian macro economic announcement news on five major australian dollar aud exchange rates specifically the daily changes of the exchange rates are modelled to ascertain the existence and the nature of the news effects in the conditional mean and variance of the changes it is found that a higher than expected current account deficit and unemployment rate announcements depreciated the aud and an unexpectedly higher gdp growth announcement appreciated it current account deficit cpi and unemployment news announcements significantly raised the conditional volatility of the changes of the aud on the days of their announcements except for the bp aud for the cpi news and there is some evidence of retail sales news reducing it in general the evidence is consistent with a view that a release of new information creates uncertainty in the markets due to a lack of consensus on the effects of the particular news announcement and the necessary course of action in add

a note on credible spatial entry deterrence abstract this note revisits the question of spatial entry deterrence to investigate the credibility of pre emption by crowding in a differentiated market judd rand j econ 16 1985 153 argues that pre emption by crowding is not a credible entry barrier because an incumbent monopolist has an ex post incentive to withdraw products in response to entry we demonstrate that pre emption by crowding may be a credible entry barrier if multiple potential entrants choose the timing of entry endogenously

the statistical distribution of exchange rates empirical evidence and economic implications the abundant evidence that changes in exchange rates have distributions with fatter tails than the normal distribution has led researchers to consider non normal distributions including the student the stable paretian and mixtures of distributions this paper compares the empirical fits of three non normal candidates and the normal distribution for daily changes in the logarithms of exchange rates using maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters and chi square goodness of fit tests the student and mixture of two normals provide the best fits but there is evidence that the distribution parameters may vary over time

the relationship between education and adult mortality in the united states prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health this paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health i follow synthetic cohorts using successive u s censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates i use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education the results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

spatial pricing in the united states west germany and japan this paper investigates the spatial pricing policies of a sample of firms in the united states west germany and japan we begin in section i by providing general results for the three countries these suggest that f o b pricing is the exception rather than the rule furthermore there appear to be significant differences between the countries in the degree of spatial price discrimination the remainder of the paper examines whether the inter country differences in spatial discrimination can be explained by a theory of spatial pricing section ii uses the theory of spatial pricing proposed in greenhut and greenhut 1975 to derive an operational model in section iii the parameters of this model are estimated from the individual country data and the results are discussed section iv presents the conclusions the data used in this study were obtained from a survey of firms in the three countries in each country target regions were selected with a similar urban rural proportions as restricted by b existing acquaintanceships with professors in or near these urban rural centres survey constraint b was imposed after a mailed questionnaire pilot study in the united states had indicated a likely need for follow up mailings phone calls and even interviews before a sufficient number of responses from a particular place e g a particular state in the united states could be expected after selecting our comparable survey areas firms were picked at random from industrial lists of business establishments in each country and questionnaires were mailed to them the questionnaire is reproduced in the appendix the firms that returned questionnaires were compared to non responding firms no distinction in size of firm industry type or location was apparent for any country or sub region studied among the respondents we dropped from the sample all firms that were not subject to a significant freight cost defined to be a 5 per cent minimum freight cost to delivered cost ratio on sales to at least one distant market point our findings on pricing strategies are summarized in table 1 firms in the united states tend to price discriminatorily of 174 sampled firms less than one third priced non discriminatorily f o b the spokesmen for the remaining firms 67 per cent admitted that they did not add full freight cost to their mill price on all of their distant sales these firms therefore priced discriminatorily the tendency to price discriminatorily is even greater in west germany and japan with the percentage of discriminating firms approximately

risk behavior and rational expectations in the u s broiler market this study examines the empirical implications of extending the rational expectations hypothesis reh to include price uncertainty a general estimation framework that incorporates both the restrictions on structural parameters and the variance covariance terms is developed garch time series processes are used to generate time varying expectations of both the means and the variances of exogenous variables the empirical application is with a quarterly model of the u s broiler industry the results indicate that the rational expectation of price variance is an important determinant of broiler supply a formal test indicates that the restrictions implied by the reh cannot be rejected

modelling the impact of central bank intervention on exchange rate volatility under inflation targeting this article empirically investigates the effect of central bank s foreign exchange interventions on the level and volatility of the uganda shilling us dollar exchange rate ugx usd under an infla

the transmission from equity markets to commodity markets in crises periods abstractthis article investigates the transmission from equity markets to commodity markets during two major financial crises namely the subprime mortgage and the sovereign debt crises we perform an analysis on sub stages from 3 january 2003 to 31 october 2013 to capture the price behaviour of both equity and commodity markets two financial crises indicators vix and cds are used to represent fear of a crisis we find that correlations between commodity and equity markets are time varying and highly volatile during a financial crisis while sharing some common features commodities cannot be considered a homogeneous asset class segmentation characteristics of commodity markets disappear in times of financial crises reducing their substitutability as an investment portfolio for asset diversification purposes through our test for granger causality we find the existence of transmission during a financial crisis volatility spillover effect also plays a major role as transmission mechanisms after the

modelling s p 100 volatility the information content of stock returns abstract theoretical models that relate volatility to the quantity of information are extended to a multi asset setting and it is deduced that stock returns may or may not have incremental information when modelling index volatility depending on the sources of information that move stock prices the first empirical study that can help resolve this theoretical uncertainty is presented a detailed analysis of the daily volatility of the s p 100 index from 1984 to 1998 shows there is some incremental volatility information in the returns from the 100 shares that define the index this evidence is obtained from arch models that incorporate leverage effects dummy variables for the 1987 crash and aggregate measures of stock return volatility significant differences between estimated volatilities are found for various stock measures and sub periods

free entry and social inefficiency our goal is to provide a simple yet general exposition of the conditions under which the number of entrants in a free entry equilibrium is excessive insufficient or optimal our analysis compares the number of firms that enter a market when there is free entry with the number that would be desired by a social planner who is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market that is we consider the second best problem of choosing the welfare maximizing number of firms while we take as given their noncompetitive behavior after entry we demonstrate that the crucial conditions for establishing the presence of an entry bias can be stated quite simply in terms of the outcome of the postentry game played by entrants in contrast to previous work we do not need to model this postentry game explicitly

equilibrium number of firms and economic welfare in a spatial price discrimination model abstract we examine welfare implications of the equilibrium number of entering firms in a spatial price discrimination model in contrast to salop salop s 1979 monopolistic competition with outside goods bell journal of economics 10 141 156 the equilibrium number of firms can be either excessive or insufficient from the normative viewpoint

macro determinants of volatility and volatility spillover in energy markets abstract we analyze the time varying volatility and spillover effects in crude oil heating oil and natural gas futures markets by incorporating changes in important macroeconomic variables and major political and weather related events into the conditional variance equations we allow asymmetric responses to random disturbances in each market as well as to good and bad economic news related to the overall economy results show the presence of asymmetric effects in both random disturbances and macroeconomic variables a bidirectional volatility spillover effect is found between natural gas and crude oil and between the natural gas and heating oil markets crude oil volatility is found to increase following major political financial and natural events seasonality and day of the week effects are found in the crude oil and heating oil markets

futures trading information and spot price volatility evidence for the ftse 100 stock index futures contract using garch abstract this paper examines the impact of trading in the ftse 100 stock index futures on the volatility of the underlying spot market to examine the relationship between information and volatility as subject neglected in previous studies the garch family of techniques is used the results suggest that futures trading has led to increased volatility but that the nature of volatility has not changed post futures the finding of price changes being integrated pre futures but being stationary post futures implies that the introduction of futures has improved the speed and quality of information flowing to the spot market

forecasting realized volatility with linear and nonlinear univariate models in this paper we consider a nonlinear model based on neural networks as well as linear models to forecast the daily volatility of the s p 500 and ftse 100 futures as a proxy for daily volatility we consider a consistent and unbiased estimator of the integrated volatility that is computed from high frequency intraday returns we also consider a simple algorithm based on bagging bootstrap aggregation in order to specify the models analysed in this paper

oligopolistic competition and economic welfare a general equilibrium analysis of entry regulation and tax subsidy schemes abstract two contributions to the general equilibrium analysis of an oligopolistic economy with free entry are intended first we generalize the excess entry theorem to the effect that a marginal decrease in the number of oligopolistic firms from the free entry equilibrium level improves economic welfare second we explore the pareto improving tax subsidy schemes in an oligopolistic economy several self financing and pareto improving tax subsidy schemes will be identified in contrast with the preceding analysis by atkinson and stiglitz which focused on the long run incidence of corporate taxation we analyse the short run as well as long run welfare implications of various policies under generalized conditions

on monopolistic competition and optimal product diversity workers rents also matter in the dixit stiglitz model of monopolistic competition entry of firms is socially too small other authors have shown that excess entry is also a possibility with other preferences for diversity we sow that workers rents also contribute to explain excess entry through a general equilibrium mechanism larger wages indeed raises the aggregate earnings and firms sales and profits which entices too many firms to enter we discuss the possibility of over provision of varieties by comparing the equilibrium to unconstrained and constrained social optima and to other regulatory frameworks where wages are not controlled

asymmetric predictability of conditional variances we show that there is an asymmetry in the predictability of the volatilities of large versus small firms using both univariate and multivariate arma garch m parameterizations we find that volatility surprises to large market value firms are important to the future dynamics of their own returns as well as the returns of smaller firms conversely however shocks to smaller firms have no impact on the behavior of either the mean or the variance of the returns of larger capitalization companies article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

a conditional variance model for daily deviations of an exchange rate a model for the distribution of daily deviations of an exchange rate is suggested the distribution is gaussian with a variance that depends on previous deviations the model is applied to the exchange rate of the u s dollar to special drawing rights

the european exchange rate mechanism and the volatility of the sterling deutschemark exchange rate sterling membership of the erm focused interest on the sterling deutsche mark exchange rate with commentators predicting a reduction in exchange rate volatility this paper analyzes the sterling deutsche mark rate pre and post erm entry and finds that erm membership significantly reduced volatility this reduction in volatility is characterized by the disappearance of arch effects evident prior to erm membership the paper argues that the disappearance of arch is probably associated with a reduction in activity of speculators particularly technical analysts copyright 1993 by royal economic society

health income and relative deprivation evidence from the bhps it is believed that income affects health directly but it is argued that indirect income effects due to relative deprivation may be equally important this paper investigates these relationships using parametric and semiparametric panel data models which ameliorate problems of misspecification and unobservable heterogeneity by allowing for a flexible functional form of income we ensure that coefficients on relative deprivation variables are not an artefact of a highly non linear relationship between health and income the results provide strong evidence for the impact of income on self reported measures of health for men and women these results are robust across a range of techniques and are resilient to the inclusion of measures of relative deprivation the parametric results for relative deprivation largely reject its influence on health although there is some evidence of an effect in the semiparametric models

weak entrants are welcome abstract this paper investigates the decision problem of an incumbent firm confronted by both a weak and strong entrant in a differentiated market suppose that the incumbent can deter entry of the weak firm but cannot deter entry of the strong firm by itself then the incumbent may allow entry of the weak firm and use it to alter the strong firm s entry decision the present paper formalizes this idea and it sheds new light on the fact that domestic firms are sometimes able to block strong foreign firms after trade liberalization the idea also explains why a dominant firm lets fringe firms be in the market

equity market neutral hedge funds and the stock market an application of score driven copula models in this article we study the time varying market neutrality of equity market neutral hedge funds we use data from the hedge fund research equity market neutral index hfrx eh which represents

relative income race and mortality abstract this paper examines the relationship between relative income and mortality our research is motivated by recent literature that posits that holding individual income fixed those whose income are low relative to the incomes of those in a reference group will have worse health we develop an empirical model in which an individual s health is a function of his or her own income and the incomes of those who live in the same geographical area we show how this individual level model can be estimated using semi aggregated data on the mortality rates of people categorized by age race gender and place of residence the model is estimated using mortality data from the 1980 and 1990 compressed mortality files merged with income data from the 1980 and 1990 5 public use samples of the us census we find no evidence that having relatively wealthy neighbors holding own income fixed is associated with higher mortality instead we find evidence that among some demographic and age groups in particular working aged black males having relatively wealthy neighbors is associated with lower mortality for example among younger aged 25 64 black men an increase in the income of others is estimated to have a beneficial effect on mortality that is 40 as large as an equivalent increase in own income

arch models properties estimation and testing abstract the aim of this survey paper is to provide an account of some of the important developments in the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model since its inception in a seminal paper by engle 1982 this model takes account of many observed properties of asset prices and therefore various interpretations can be attributed to it we start with the basic arch models and discuss their different interpretations arch models have been generalized in different directions to accommodate more and more features of the real world we provide a comprehensive treatment of many of the extensions of the original arch model next we discuss estimation and testing for arch models and note that these models lead to some interesting and unique problems there have been numerous applications and we mention some of these as we present different models the paper includes a glossary of the acronyms for the models we describe

why are recessions good for your health a series of influential papers by christopher j ruhm 2000 2003 2005 2008 documents that recessions are good for your health or more specifically that state level mortality rates are strongly procyclical the magnitude of the correlation is economically meaningful a typical estimate from the literature suggests that a 1 percentage point increase in a state s unemployment rate is associated with a 0 54 percent reduction in that state s mortality rates if this reflects a causal relationship that is also valid at the national level then a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate would translate based on 2004 mortality rates into about 12 000 fewer deaths per year these findings are frequently interpreted as resulting from the rising opportunity cost of time that accompanies better labor market opportunities and some empirical support exists for this interpretation for example ruhm 2000 shows that obesity and smoking also exhibit a procyclical pattern the economy and health

the samuelson hypothesis in futures markets an analysis using intraday data this paper considers the samuelson hypothesis which argues that the futures price volatility increases as the futures contract approaches its expiration utilizing intraday data from 20 futures markets in six futures exchanges we find strong support for the samuelson hypothesis in agricultural futures however the samuelson hypothesis does not hold for other futures contracts we also provide supporting evidence that the negative covariance hypothesis is the key factor for the empirical support of the samuelson hypothesis in addition our findings remain largely unaltered even after we control for seasonality and liquidity effects

the economics of eco labeling standards costs and prices abstract the existing eco label landscape is fragmented because of the presence of numerous labels with different standards and is a pre competitive environment for firms to play in with many unanswered questions different standards eco labels are built around have different effects on credibility and legitimacy costs and benefits and ability to achieve sustainability goals of eco labeling focusing on eco label standards and using a hotelling type horizontal differentiation model we identify standards specific issues for and characterize primary barriers to eco labeling some of the major findings are as follows 1 more rigorous environmental standards enforced by higher integrity labels do not necessarily translate into higher selling prices 2 higher prices commanded by labeled products do not guarantee that a firm will derive higher profits from eco labeling 3 auditing fees paid per product unit being inspected for ensuring compliance with an eco label standard rather than participation fees paid up front is the primary de facto barrier to business involvement in eco labeling and 4 customers willingness to pay price premiums for eco labeled products is not a sufficient condition to generate a premium in the market

entry barriers and economic welfare the relationship between economic welfare and the number of firms in a quasi cournot market is examined in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that can enforce the marginal cost principle to the firms along with regulating the number of firms it is shown that there exist excessive number of firms at the free entry quasicournot equilibrium vis a vis the first best welfare maximizing number of firms the thrust of this result essentially survives even if we replace a utopian first best government by a secondbest government that leaves the firms to pursue their respective profit maximization freely and engages solely in regulating the number of firms it can be shown that the excess entry prevails again in this second best world recent studies in the theoretical industrial organization literature have uncovered several instances which cast serious doubt on the reasonableness of a widespread belief that increasing competition will increase welfare stiglitz 1981 p 184 it has been shown that there are cases which are not altogether unreasonable where social welfare will be increased by strengthening rather than weakening the protection of incumbent firms from the threat of potential entry this is in sharp contrast with the traditional belief 2 what is not known however is how robust these pathologies in fact are we intend to settle this problem by proving two excess entry theorems in the quasi cournot parametric conjectural variations homogeneous oligopoly model seade 1980a b in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that could costlessly enforce the marginal cost pricing principle by firms in an oligopolistic market and regulate entry in pursuit of first best social welfare optimization it is shown that the number of firms at the free entry equilibrium exceeds the first best welfare optimizing number of firms the result has already been noted by von weizsacker 1980a b and others in terms of numerical examples our theorem 1 asserts that this phenomenon always holds true for the family of quasi cournot models at hand an implication of this result is that the existence of entry barriers which protect incumbent firms from potential competitors is not necessarily welfare decreasing in sharp contrast with the traditional belief a problem remains with theorem 1 however in that an omnipotent first best government does not exist in reality and the first best ideal is unrealizable in the actual economy therefore even if the intervention by a first best government with a view to restricting the number of firms within an industry may be welfare improving it does

a note on the excess entry theorem in spatial markets abstract vickrey vickrey w s 1964 microstatics harcourt brace and world new york shows that the number of firms entering is excessive in his circle model of product differentiation we broaden his result to a large class of transport and production cost functions in particular convex transport and production costs always entail excessive entry as long as a price equilibrium exists we also provide an example of insufficient entry in equilibrium

product variety and welfare under tough and soft pricing regimes we re examine the economic justification for the regulation of firms price policies existing analysis of the relative benefits of alternative pricing policies by treating market structure as exogenous loses an important trade off price deregulation leading to for example discriminatory pricing on the one hand enhances competition between incumbents but on the other acts as a strong deterrent against entry we illustrate this trade off by analysing the familiar address model of product differentiation and show that product variety is determined by the degree of spatial contestability of the market the ability of entrants to make binding location commitments and by whether firms are free to price discriminate copyright 1996 by royal economic society

mortality and immortality the nobel prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity it has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary causality however remains trenchantly debated the ideal experiment would be one in which extra status could somehow be dropped upon a sub sample of individuals while those in a control group of comparable individuals received none this paper attempts to formulate a test in that spirit it collects 19th century birth data on science nobel prize winners correcting for potential biases we estimate that winning the prize compared to merely being nominated is associated with between 1 and 2 years of extra longevity

aspirations health and the cost of inequality how does inequality motivate people and at what cost in a model of perpetual youth people have heterogeneous upward looking aspirations they value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution their survival depends on health capital produced from time investment and health goods higher fundamental inequality working through the aspirations gap motivates people to work and save more economic outcomes improve but income and consumption inequality worsen because the poor have less capacity to respond on the labor market by diverting resources from health production aspirations also worsen mortality especially for the poor though relative income has a strong negative effect on personal health inequality has a weak effect on population health explaining an empirical puzzle on the relative income and health gradient

american garch employee stock option valuation abstract we implement a flexible simulation based approach for the fair value of employee stock option eso that accounts for the vesting period departure risk and voluntary suboptimal early exercise we introduce garch effects on the underlying asset and we analyze the price bias with respect to the constant volatility case we also perform a sensitivity analysis with respect to changes in several eso characteristics we compare this valuation with fas 123 method revealing a fas overvaluation finally we value a real eso plan providing the confidence intervals for the estimated eso prices

final and intermediate goods taxation in an oligopolistic economy with free entry abstract optimal tax rules are analyzed in an oligopolistic economy with free entry the initial market allocation has two types of distortion price is set above marginal cost by the oligopolistic behavior and the advantage of increasing returns to scale is left to be unexploited by excessive entry of oligopolists with production subsidy accompanied by a self financing lump sum franchise tax on oligopolistic firms pareto efficient allocation could be restored without a lump sum tax on oligopolists however the second best optimum requires taxing intermediate inputs used in the oligopolistic industry the optimal intermediate goods taxation follows the production side ramsey rule to encourage the use of intermediate inputs elastic to output level and vice versa

market interactions in returns and volatilities between spot and forward shipping freight markets abstract the lead lag relationship in both returns and volatilities between spot and futures markets has been investigated extensively in the financial economics literature only a limited number of such studies have appeared on forward markets primarily due to the lack of easy access to empirical data this paper uses a unique database in over the counter forward freight agreements ffa to investigate the issue the underlying commodity is non storable being that of a shipping service with the additional feature of transactions costs being higher in the spot market in comparison to the forward market these features have interesting implications for the markets at the practical level the better understanding of the mean and variance dynamics can improve risk management and budget planning decisions

forecasting the var of crude oil market do alternative distributions help abstract accurate modeling of the empirical distribution of crude oil market returns is extremely important in estimating risk measures in addition to several commonly used distributions alternative distributions are explored in this study some of which account for the asymmetry and heavy tails simultaneously found in distributions and contain more tail parameters to separately depict the right and left tails when forecasting the value at risk var of crude oil markets during highly volatile periods seven backtests are also conducted to compare the var forecasting accuracy among different distributions the empirical results indicate that a highly volatile environment challenges the commonly used distributions and the four risk models based on commonly used distributions are rejected about 27 to 38 of the time the alternative distributions i e skewed general error distributions sged generalized hyperbolic skewed student t distributions ghst and generalized asymmetric student t gast distributions generally produce more accurate var measurement and gast gives the best measurement accuracy the empirical results imply that risk managers or policymakers should further consider more flexible distributions such as sged ghst or gast in particular when quantifying or managing the risk in turbulent market times

volatility persistence in crude oil markets financial market participants and policy makers can benefit from a better understanding of how shocks can affect volatility over time this study assesses the impact of structural changes and outliers on volatility persistence of three crude oil markets brent west texas intermediate wti and organization of petroleum exporting countries opec between january 2 1985 and june 17 2011 we identify outliers using a new semi parametric test based on conditional heteroscedasticity models these large shocks can be associated with particular event patterns such as the invasion of kuwait by iraq the operation desert storm the operation desert fox and the global financial crisis as well as opec announcements on production reduction or us announcements on crude inventories we show that outliers can bias i the estimates of the parameters of the equation governing volatility dynamics ii the regularity and non negativity conditions of garch type models garch igarch figarch and hygarch and iii the detection of structural breaks in volatility and thus the estimation of the persistence of the volatility therefore taking into account the outliers on the volatility modelling process may improve the understanding of volatility in crude oil markets

helping minor firms reduces welfare the effect on national welfare of uneven technical progress and eli mination of a firm is analyzed under the existence of a cournot oligopolistic sector an increase in the share of an inefficient firm owing to its innovations results in a shift of production from more efficient firms to the inefficient firm causing a less efficie nt allocation of production it may decrease welfare even though the innovation itself is beneficial conversely policies keeping ineffic ient firms from innovations or eliminating them may increase welfare though they make the market structure more oligopolistic copyright 1988 by royal economic society

are daily and weekly load and spot price dynamics in australia s national electricity market governed by episodic nonlinearity in this article we use half hourly spot electricity prices and load data for the national electricity market nem of australia for the period from december 1998 to june 2009 to test for episodic nonlinearity in the dynamics governing daily and weekly cycles in load and spot price time series data we apply the portmanteau correlation bicorrelation and tricorrelation tests introduced in hinich 1996 to the time series of half hourly spot prices and load demand from 7 12 1998 to 30 06 2009 using a fortran 95 program we find the presence of significant third and fourth order nonlinear serial dependence in the weekly load and spot price data in particular but to a much more marginal extent in the daily data

modelling the conditional volatility of commodity index futures as a regime switching process commodity index futures offer a versatile tool for gaining different forms of exposure to commodity markets volatility is a critical input in many of these applications this paper examines issues in modelling the conditional variance of futures returns based on the goldman sachs commodity index gsci given that commodity markets tend to be choppy webb 1987 a general econometric model is proposed that allows for abrupt changes or regime shifts in volatility transition probabilities which vary explicitly with observable fundamentals such as the basis garch dynamics seasonal variations and conditional leptokurtosis the model is applied to daily futures returns on the gsci over 1992 1997 the results show clear evidence of regime shifts in conditional mean and volatility once regime shifts are accounted for garch effects are minimal consistent with the theory of storage returns are more likely to switch to the high variance state when the basis is negative than when the basis is positive the regime switching model also performs well in forecasting the daily volatility compared to standard garch models without regime switches the model should be of interest to sophisticated traders who base their trading strategies on short term volatility movements managed commodity funds interested in hedging an underlying diversified portfolio of commodities and investors of options and other derivatives tied to gsci futures contracts copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

on the strategic choice of spatial price policy the strategic incentives with respect to the choice of price policy in spatial competition are analyzed in a duopoly model price discrimination emerges as the unique equilibriu m outcome in games with either simultaneous choice of policy and pric e or sequential choice where firms may commit first to uniform mill p ricing before the actual market stage nevertheless profits may be h igher with uniform pricing the authors models are applied to analyz e some common business practices that arise in geographical pricing like the basing point system and in the pricing of varieties or opti ons from a base product in a product differentiation context copyright 1988 by american economic association

absolute income relative income income inequality and mortality we test whether mortality is related to individual income mean community income and community income inequality controlling for initial health status and personal characteristics the analysis is based on a random sample from the adult swedish population of more than 40 000 individuals who were followed up for 10 17 years we find that mortality decreases significantly as individual income increases for mean community income and community income inequality we cannot however reject the null hypothesis of no effect on mortality this result is stable with respect to a number of measurement and specification issues explored in an extensive sensitivity analysis

bridging the gap between the distribution of realized ecu volatility and arch modelling of the euro the garch nig model summary this paper bridges the gap between traditional arch modelling and recent advances on realized volatilities based on a ten year sample of five minute returns for the ecu basket currencies versus the us dollar we find that the realized volatilities constructed from the summation of the high frequency intraday squared returns conditional on the lagged squared daily returns are approximately inverse gaussian ig distributed while the distribution of the daily returns standardized by their realized volatilities is approximately normal moreover the implied daily garch model with normal inverse gaussian nig errors estimated for the ecu returns results in very accurate out of sample predictions for the three years of actual daily euro us dollar exchange rates copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

a note on the excess entry theorem in spatial models with elastic demand abstract this paper revisits the excess entry theorem in spatial models according to vickrey vickrey w s 1964 microstatics harcourt brace and world new york and salop salop s 1979 monopolistic competition with outside goods bell journal of economics 10 141 156 while relaxing the assumption of inelastic demand using a demand function with a constant demand elasticity we show that the number of firms that enter a market decreases with the degree of demand elasticity we find that the excess entry theorem does only hold when the demand elasticity is sufficiently small otherwise there is insufficient entry in the limiting case of unit elastic demand the market is monopolized we broaden our results with a more general transportation cost function

some empirical evidence on the time series properties of four uk asset prices in this paper the authors examine the time series behavior of four u k asset prices and estimate two types of models for the differenced series much previous research has found the presence of time varying heteroskedasticity in the error process for asset prices a linear model with gqarch errors is compared to a joint bilinear model with gqarch errors the latter choice motivated by the ability of bilinear models to capture turbulent behavior the adequacy of these models is determined by examining simulations and also employing test statistics the forecasting performance of the two models is also compared copyright 1996 by the london school of economics and political science