In this paper, I explain two "puzzles" which have been observed in firm level data. (1) Firms which display a high sensitivity ofinvestment to cash ow (com- monly believed to be an indicator of liquidity constraints) usually have large unutilized lines of credit which, presumably, could be used...

The Netherlands will be confronted with an almost doubling of the old-age dependency ratio over the next forty years. The costs of the ageing population are primarily reflected in larger expenditures on pensions and health care. This paper explores the consequences of ageing in a baseline...

This paper illustrates the lack of research in the area of the process by which coalitions formed. Showing how the questions regarding process have been previously ignored, it demonstrates their importance. Then motives for a computational approach are addressed. The main point being that in...

One of the biggest issues in using likelihood methods to evaluate and compare Real Business Cycle models is the lack of stochastic components, or lack of dimensionality, in the models. There have been a number of approaches to remedy this problem. One method is to add stochastic elements such as...

The paper first compares the use of optimization heuristics to the classical optimization techniques for the selection of optimal portfolios. Second, the heuristic approach is applied to problems other than those in the standard mean-variance framework where the classical optimization fails.

In this paper we propose an approach to modelling non-linear conditionally heteroscedastic time series characterised by asymmetries in both the conditional mean and variance. This is achieved by combining a TAR model for the conditional mean with a Changing Parameters Volatility (CPV) model for...

The location of the global optimum is very desirable in nonlinear parameter estimation problems. Using a local rather than global optimum most likely will result in inconsistent estimators. While many commercial software packages have good optimization routines, these usually only find local...

This paper presents a new method for the pricing of discrete Asian options when assuming a deterministic volatility as specified in Dupire (1993). Using a homogeneity property, we show how to reduce an n+1 dimensional problem to a 2 dimensional one. Previous research has been intensively...

In this paper, we simulate a decentralized multiple dealership market using agent based model. Risk averse dealers receive order flow from customers, which can not be observed by the other dealers. Then dealers trade among themselves. Neural net-works are used to represent a decision model for...

The unprecedented easiness of exchanging information among consumers on the internet could add another dimension to the firms' competition against each other. In this paper, we introduce consumers' learning from each other about the degree of product differentiation into a Hotelling duopoly...