We adapt Brandt's (1999) nonparametric approach to determine the optimal portfolio choice of a risk averse foreign exchange investor who uses moving average trading signals as the information instrument for investment opportunities. Additionally, we assess the economic value of the estimated...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of payment cards use on the amount of money in circulation in Belgium. In all developed countries the amout of notes and coins has decreased over the past years. Such tendency can be attributed to a slow, but continuous process of substitution of...

This paper presents an essentially affine model of the term structure of interest rates making use of macroeconomic factors and their long-run expectations. The model extends the approach pioneered by Kozicki and Tinsley (2001) by modelling consistently long-run inflation expectations...

In this paper we estimate and test a multi-factor CIR model for three countries: the USA, Germany and the UK. We find that the estimated model reproduces not only the correlation within each of the bond markets considered but also those observed between markets, suggesting the existence of...

In this paper we assess the effects of monetary unification in Europe on the pricing behavior in financial markets and more in particular on excess returns. We use the standard IAPT framework to analyze the role of the exchange rate in separating excess return pricing accross European countries....

Non-radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation. Whereas existing non-radial measures are still based on the product mix...

We argue that efficiency assessments of academic research should focus on micro-units of research production rather than on conventionally employed (aggregated) macro-units, and show that such a detailed analysis of research performance provides interesting insights. In addition, we propose a...

We develop a positive non-parametric model of public sector production that allows us to test whether an implicit procedure of cost minimization at shadow prices can rationalize the outcomes of public sector activities. The basic model focuses on multiple C-outputs and does not imply any...

The United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI) takes several dimensions ---income, school enrolment and literacy rate, longevity--- and combines them into a single figure that measures the degree of development of a given country. However, there is disagreement about (i) how to normalize the...

There is a general interest in ranking performances (e.g., in sports or policy), which essentially implies aggregating several performance dimensions. The usual approach considers a 'cardinal' linear weighting of the different single-dimensional performance indicators. We present an alternative...