Using annual data for the period 1992-2012, this paper examines trade flows between China and its main trade partners in Asia, North America and Europe, and whether increasing trade has led to industrial structural adjustment and changes in China’s trade patterns. The analysis is based on both...

This paper uses data from a panel of more than 400 Italian banks for the period 2001 – 2012 to examine the main determinants of loan loss provision (LLP), which are classified as either discretionary (income smoothing, capital management,signalling) or non-discretionary (related to the...

A canonical two country-two good model with standard preferences does not address three classic international macroeconomic puzzles as well as two well-known asset pricing puzzles. Specifically, under financial autarky, it does not account for the high real exchange rate (RER) volatility...

This paper provides some new empirical evidence on the weekend effect, one of the most recognized anomalies in financial markets. Two different methods are used: (i) a trading robot approach to examine whether or not there is such an anomaly giving rise to exploitable profit opportunities by...

This paper analyses macroeconomic and financial determinants of bad loans applying a SVAR approach to investigate whether excessive loans granted during expansionary phases can explain the more than proportional increase in non-performing loans during contractionary periods. The results indicate...

One of the leading criticisms of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the presence of so-called "anomalies", i.e. empirical evidence of abnormal behaviour of asset prices which is inconsistent with market efficiency. However, most studies do not take into account transaction costs. Their...

This paper investigates the time-varying impact of oil price uncertainty on stock prices in China using weekly data on ten sectoral indices over the period January 1997-Febraury 2014. The estimation of a bivariate VAR-GARCH-in-mean model suggests that oil price volatility affects stock returns...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of both the conditional mean and variance of UK real GDP over the period 1851-2013 by estimating a multivariate ARFIMA-FIGARCH model (with the unemployment rate and inflation as explanatory variables). The results suggest that this series is...

Using a panel of annual data for 20 countries we show that synchronized fiscal consolidation (stimulus) programmes in different countries make their business cycles more closely linked, especially in the case of fiscal adjustments lasting 2 or 3 years. We also find: (i) little evidence of...

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within...