This paper examines the celebrated “strength of weak ties” theory of Granovetter (1973). We examine two hypotheses implied by the theory: one, for any three players with two links present, the probability of a third link being present is increasing in the strength of the two ties, and two, the...

Due to high and low volatility periods, time series of absolute returns experience temporary level shifts which differ in length and size. In this paper we modify the basic Censored Latent Effects Autoregressive [CLEAR] model, such that it can describe and forecast the location and size of such...

GARCH models and Stochastic Volatility (SV) models can both be used to describe unobserved volatility in asset returns. We consider the issue of testing a GARCH model against an SV model. For that purpose, we propose a new and parsimonious GARCH-t model with an additional restricted moving...