The damages of smoking on health have been taken more and more seriously, most relative studies focus on fields in sociology, psychology, public health or economy. The act of smoking itself satisfies the smoker's need for consumption, but at the same time produces negative effect such as smoking...

This paper investigates the finite-sample behaviour of sovereign credit migration estimators and analyzes the properties of the rating process. Through bootstrap simulations, we compare a discrete multinomial estimator and two continuous hazard rate methods which differ in that one neglects...

This paper shows that the standard Mortensen-Pissarides framework embedded in a RBC macroeconomic model with risk averse agents, capital and a labor-leisure choice has the ability to match all moments of the ac- tual US-unemployment rate and other labor market variables within tight bounds when...

A high degree of cyclical synchronization between the new EU member states (NMS) from Central and Eastern Europe and the euro area is generally seen as a prerequisite for successful EMU enlargement. We establish stylized facts on economic linkages between NMS and the euro area using dynamic...

In recent years the computers have shown to be a powerful tool in financial forecasting. Many machine learning techniques have been utilized to predict movements in financial markets. Machine learning classifiers involve extending the past experiences into the future. However the rareness of...

The policies related to regional economic activity developed by European Union (EU) and the role played by regions as economic subject have determined a bigger set of disaggregated statistics at macroeconomic level. The methodologies used nowadays by the Italian national institute of statistics...

A mutual insurance firm is a firm whose stockholders are the bearers of the insurance contracts. Insurance is then viewed as a collective (pooled) process of persons paying a fixed (or variable, contingent) amount monthly (the premium) and seeking protection against claims that may occur to any...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

This paper studies the choice of the monetary regime in a small open economy with special focus on the EMU accession countries. In the framework of a two - country DSGE model we conduct policy experiments consisting in analysing the effects of different monetary regimes (roughly representing the...

We study how well a New Keynesian business cycle model can explain the observed behavior of nominal interest rates. We focus on two puzzles raised in previous literature. First, Donaldson, Johnsen, and Mehra (1990) show that while in the U.S. nominal term structure the interest rates are...