This study is Work In Progress and focuses on Phase 1 of the proposed study. Phase 2 will be implemented in spring 2011. The purpose of phase 1 is to introduce ESI (Economic Sentiment Indicator) to the field of tourism demand studies. The proposed study is intended to develop a demand model in...

I argue that household specialization and investment in firm-specific human capital explainthe male marriage premium. First I develop a model of human capital in which to-be-married men invest in human capital over two rounds. The promise of high returns to the second round of investment...

The economic repercussions of September 11th are unique in that never before have economists needed to forecast and examine the impact of an event of such magnitude. This paper explains many of the economic effects of September l Ith, from the initial aftermath to recent developments. These...

This study examines the distributional properties of futures prices for contracts traded on LIFFE. A filtering process is employed to remove day of the week and holiday effects, a maturity effect, moving average effects and the influence of an asset's conditional variance from the raw returns...

We examine whether hedging effectiveness is affected by asymmetry in the return distribution by applying tail specific metrics to compare the hedging effectiveness of short and long hedgers using crude oil futures contracts. The metrics used include Lower Partial Moments (LPM), Value at Risk...

Financial risk model evaluation or backtesting is a key part of the internal model’sapproach to market risk management as laid out by the Basle Committee on BankingSupervision (2004). However there are a number of backtests that may be applied andthere is little guidance as to the most...

Volatility modelling is a key issue for the finance industry from an academic and practitioner perspective. This is understandable given the importance that volatility plays in risk management and the development of accurate risk measures in a univariate or multivariate framework. To illustrate,...

Using a time-varying approach, this paper examines the dynamics of volatility in the real estate investment trust (REIT) sector. The results highlight the attractiveness and suitability of using GARCH based approaches in the modeling of daily REIT volatility.The paper examines the factors that...