This paper illustrates a procedure for fitting financial data with alpha-stable distributions. After using all the available methods to evaluate the distribution parameters, one can qualitatively select the best estimate and run some goodness-of-fit tests on this estimate, in order to...

This paper reports several entirely new results on financial market dynamics and option pricing We observe that empirical distributions of returns are much better approximated by an exponential distribution than by a Gaussian. This exponential distribution of asset prices can be used to develop...

There are mainly two types of theories explaining banking crisis, emanating from the monetarist school respectively institutional economics. Using an allegory, monetarists are discussing how much water in terms of liquidity that is needed to stop a fire escalating into a disaster, while...

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

Higher education has been viewed as a potential instrument of national economic development. Human resource development in Eritrea is important for making the nation self-reliant thus the efforts are exerted to achieve this objective. However, Eritrea has been facing so many challenges in its...

Trend following strategies have the reputation of being the holy grail of investment. This paper investigates the trend following strategy both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. This article also discusses conditional expected return and the drawdown with Value at Risk (VaR). VaR...

One of the basic components of the management of a programme of reform is the Stakeholder Analysis. It allows understanding and assessing the programme environment and provides to the management information defining the negociation position in the programme implementation. The paper undertakes a...

We investigate the long-standing puzzle on the underpricings of convertible bonds. We hypothesize that the observed underpricing is induced by the possibility that a convertible bond might renegotiate on some of its covenants, e.g., an imbedded put option in financial difficulties. Consistent...