In this work we measure the evolution of the long-range dependence phenomenon of returns and volatilities of nominal British exchange rates (British pound against US dollar) futures contracts negotiated on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1986 to 2004. The measurement employs the R/S classic...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between stock prices and exchange rates in the Brazilian economy. We use recently developed unit root and cointegration tests, which allow endogenous breaks, to test for a long run relationship between these variables. We performed linear, and...

In this paper we assess if the financial market liberalization introduced in the beginning of the 1990s in Greece has changed the degree of market development (efficiency) by studying time-varying global Hurst exponents. Our results suggest that changes in financial market liberalization have...

This paper tests whether diversification of the credit portfolio at the bank level leads to better performance and lower risk. We employ a new high frequency (monthly) panel data for the Brazilian banking system with information at the bank level for loans by economic sector. We find that loan...

Using disaggregated data from the Brazilian stock market, we calculate default probabilities for 30 different economic sectors. Empirical results suggest that domestic macroeconomic factors can explain these default probabilities. In addition, we construct the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) and the...

This paper investigates cost, technical and allocative efficiencies for Brazilian banks in the recent period (2000-2007). We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. Brazilian banks were found to have low levels of economic (cost) efficiency compared to banks in Europe...

This paper employs a Bayesian stochastic frontier, providing exact inference on both cost and profit efficiencies of the Indian banking sector in the period of 2000-2006. We also test for the inclusion of off-balance sheet data in model specification. The findings suggest that public banks are...

This paper studies the Brazilian term structure of interest rates and characterises how the term premia have changed over time. We employ a Kalman filter approach, which is extended to take into account regime switches and overlapping forecasts errors. Empirical evidence suggests that term...

This paper discusses a new approach to controlling for the environment when estimating efficiency. In response to the literature on the international comparison of bank efficiency, we draw the attention to a local dimension of comparison. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local...