In this paper we show the degrees of persistence of the time series if eight European stock market indices are measured, after their lack of ergodicity and stationarity has been established. The proper identification of the nature of the persistence of financial time series forms a crucial step...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

Singer and Karnosky's (1995) exact and complete return attribution framework does not account for risk, since it ignores accumulated historical information. Its implied investment strategy selection is based on simple return maximization and ignores that investment strategies are correlated via...

Portfolio diversification may not always lower the portfolio risk, but may actually increase it. It depends on the long memory and distributional stability characteristics of the underlying rates of return. This disturbing result is based on the theoretical Fama- Samuelson proposition of...

Financial turbulence is a phenomenon occurring in anti - persistent markets. In contrast, financial crises occur in persistent markets. A relationship can be established between these two extreme phenomena of long term market dependence and the older financial concept of financial...

For the first time, non-parametric statistical tests, originally developed by Sherry (1992) to test the efficiency of information processing in nervous systems, are used to ascertain if the Asian FX rates followed random walks. The stationarity and serial independence of the price changes are...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

The efficiency of speculative markets, as represented by Fama's 1970 fair game model, is tested on weekly price index data of six Asian stock markets - Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand - using Sherry's (1992) non-parametric methods. These scientific testing methods...

Liberalization of Singapore's financial sector causes its fund management industry to expand rapidly. As of December 1, 1998 there were 191 unit trusts to choose from. Eventually, Singapore, like the USA and Hong Kong, will have more unit trusts than stocks listed on its exchange. Many...

This paper identifies the Multifractal Models of Asset Return (MMARs) from the eight nodal term structure series of US Treasury rates as well as the Fed Funds rate and, after proper synthesis, simulates those MMARs. We show that there is an inverse persistence term structure in the sense that...