This note describes ParallelKnoppix, a bootable CD that allows econometricians with average knowledge of computers to create and begin using a high performance computing cluster for parallel computing in very little time. The computers used may be heterogeneous machines, and clusters of up to...

We develop extensions of the variance-ratio statistic for testing the hypothesis a time series is uncorrelated and investigate their finite-sample performance. The tests employ an estimator of the asymptotic covariance matrix of the sample autocorrelations that is consistent under the null for...

In Japan, demands for Broadband Internet Access and Internet Telephony have increased dramatically in recent years. According to official sources, as of September 2005, there were 21.4 million users of Broadband Internet Access and 9.76 million IP telephones in use. In this study, we employ a...

DSGE models are customarily built in the presence of uncertainties of various levels, such as the specification of behavioural equations of economic agents, the actual values of model parameters, and so on. When the degree of complexity of the model structure and its parameterization increases,...

I consider the problem of detecting and predicting regime switching behaviour in the context of Indian Stock Market data. First I discuss detection of volatility change points using the LRT and the Binary Segmentation procedure of Vostrikova (1981). The detected volatility changes are correlated...

The empirical evidence from financial markets suggests that the pattern of response of market volatility to shocks is highly dependent on the magnitude of shocks themselves. Markov-Switching GARCH (MS-GARCH) models are a valuable tool for modelling state dependence in the dynamics of the...

We develop a new approach to valuing and hedging basket options. We consider baskets of assets with potentially negative portfolio weights (spread options are a subclass of such basket options). The basket distribution is approximated using a generalized family of log-normal distributions. This...

In applied microeconometric panel data analyses, time-constant random effects and first-order Markov chains are the most prevalent structures to account for intertemporal correlations in limited dependent variable models. An example from health economics shows that the addition of a simple...

This paper describes and analyses the use of the Filtered Historical Simulation algorithm in pricing spread options. Spread options are contracts whose payoff depends on the price difference (spread) between two or more underlying assets at a future date. Such kind of options are written in the...