We carry out a large-scale investigation of technical trading rules in the foreign exchange market, using daily data over a maximum of forty years for thirty developed and emerging market currencies. Employing a stepwise test to safeguard against data-snooping bias and examining over 21,000...

Notwithstanding a resurgence in research on out-of-sample forecasts of the price of oil in recent years, there is one important approach to forecasting the real price of oil which has not been studied systematically to date. This approach is based on the premise that demand for crude oil derives...

Historical time-series data is short relative to the frequency of political and economic crises. This makes it difficult to use pure time-series methods to identify the impacts of safe haven demand on asset prices, in the face of confounding effects from a wide range of alternative drivers. We...

Based on a two-country, two-period general equilibrium model of the spot and futures markets for crude oil, we show that there is no theoretical support for the common view that oil futures prices are good predictors of the spot price in the mean-squared error sense; yet under certain conditions...

We study the effects of a conditional cash transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance at school (passing grades) and the effect of a...

We study the implications of ownership and its induced incentives on firm performance in the ‘New Economy’. Instead of traditional performance we use firm survival on the stock market as the performance indicator. Using a unique data set of all 341 firms listed on the Neuer Markt, the German...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions where commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure through both formal contracts and informal agreements,...

We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...

The theoretical literature on trade and growth suggests that comparative advantage is endogenous and evolves over time. However, most of the empirical analysis of international trade flows is essentially static in nature. This paper proposes an empirical model of the dynamics of international...

If labour market policies aimed at people with disabilities are effective, we should observe no significant difference in labour market outcomes between disabled and non-disabled individuals. This Paper examines the impact of disability status on labour market outcomes using matching methods...