We apply the Pesaran (2007) pair-wise approach of convergence to the per capita outputs of 195 European regions for the period 1980–2006. Pesaran's approach is based on the computation of the percentage ratio of output gaps which fulfil a given convergence criterion. A high ratio will be...

Gaussian time-series models are often specified through their spectral density. Such models pose several computational challenges, in particular because of the non-sparse nature of the covariance matrix. We derive a fast approximation of the likelihood for such models. We use importance sampling...

This paper proposes a new ‘World Volatility Index’, coined WVIX, by constructing the first index that approximates the aggregate volatility level of the G20 countries. The empirical analysis makes use of the factor dynamic conditional correlation model – with an automated methodology to...

This paper analyses the qualitative properties of optimal contracts when agents have multiple priors and are uncertainty averse in an infinite state space framework. The case of the epsilon-contamination of a given prior, a basic tool in robustness theory is fully developped. It is shown that if...

This paper undertakes the issue of portfolio insurance from the perspective of a risk-averse agent requiring his financial wealth to grow at a floored rate in excess of an equity benchmark. The suggested solution is a generalization of the CPPI approach within a two-equity asset framework. The...

Different kinds of asymmetries between players can occur in core allocations, in that case the stability of the concept is questioned. One remedy consists in selecting robust core allocations. We review, in this note, results that all select core allocations in NTU games with different concepts...

We prove the non-emptiness of the core of an NTU game satisfying a condition of payoff-dependent balancedness, based on transfer rate mappings. We also define a new equilibrium condition on transfer rates and we prove the existence of core payoff vectors satisfying this condition. The additional...

In many practical contexts where a number of agents have to find a common decision, the votes do not come all together at the same time. In such situations, we may want to preprocess the information given by the subelectorate (consisting of the voters who have expressed their votes) so as to...

Voting on multiple related issues is an important and difficult problem. The key difficulty is that the number of alternatives is exponential in the number of issues, and hence it is infeasible for the agents to rank all the alternatives. A simple approach is to vote on the issues one at a...

The paper provides an introduction to exterior differential calculus, and an application to the standard problem of the characterization of aggregate demand in an economy in which the number of agents is smaller than the number of goods.