This paper identifies policies to increase productivity in the East, reduce regional income disparities, and promote overall income convergence. Achieving this objective will require improving educational attainment and reducing skill mismatches in the East, scaling up public infrastructure to...

This paper develops a new framework and statistical tools to analyze stock returns using high-frequency data. We consider a continuous-time multifactor model via a continuous-time multivariate regression model incorporating realistic empirical features, such as persistent stochastic volatilities...

We propose several multivariate variance ratio statistics. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the statistics and scalar functions thereof under the null hypothesis that returns are unpredictable after a constant mean adjustment (i.e., under the weak form Efficient Market Hypothesis). We do...

Minimum variance strategies are a proven approach to profiting from the low volatility effect, but if taken directly from an optimizer they tend to have disadvantageous attributes such as low liquidity, high turnover, high tracking error, and concentrated positions in stocks, economic sectors,...

This study employs option-price data to back out the implied cross-sectional return variance in the G10 currencies. It investigates the relation of implied cross-sectional return dispersion in the currency market and subsequent realized cross-sectional return dispersion. We find that implied...

A significant proportion of the debt issued by investment grade firms has maturities greater than 20 years. In this paper we provide evidence that gap-filling behavior is an important determinant of these very long-term issues. Using data on individual corporate debt issues between 1987 and...

Various types of uncertainty shocks can explain many phenomena in macroeconomics and finance. But does this just amount to inventing new, exogenous, unobserved shocks to explain challenging features of business cycles? This paper argues that three conceptually distinct fluctuations, all called...

We propose global and disaggregated spillover indices that allow us to assess variance and covariance spillovers, locally in time and conditionally on time-t information. Key to our approach is the vector moving average representation of the half-vectorized 'squared' multivariate GARCH process...

Two shrinkage estimators for the global minimum variance portfolio that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return are derived. The presented results hold for any number of observations n = d 2 and number of assets d = 4. The...

Various types of uncertainty shocks can explain many phenomena in macroeconomics and finance. But does this just amount to inventing new, exogenous, unobserved shocks to explain challenging features of business cycles? This paper argues that three conceptually distinct fluctuations, all called...