Evaluating investments with long-term consequences using discount rates that decline with the time horizon, (Declining Discount Rates or DDRs) means that future welfare changes are of greater consequence in present value terms. Recent work in this area has turned towards operationalising the...

We estimate schedules of declining discount rates for cost benefit analysis in the UK. We highlight the importance of model selection for this task and hence for the evaluation of long-term investments, namely climate change prevention and nuclear build.

This paper employs a new methodology for measuring the contribution of growth and interest rate differentials to the half-life of deviations from Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Our method is based on directly comparing the impulse response function of a VAR model, where the real exchange rate is...

draft paper

This paper suggests that IV estimators, utilizing irrelevant but persistent instruments mai produce reliable inferences, in small samples, in cases where the endogenous variables contaii autoregressive roots near unity. In such cases, these estimators appear to outperform IV estimator: with...

Our analysis takes the perspective of an equity fund manager who seeks a potential safe haven asset to protect her portfolio during market downturns. We employ a regime-switching framework, within which we separate common and idiosyncratic shocks, to assess the suitability of gold, 10-year and...

This paper decomposes the overall market (CAPM) risk into parts re.ecting uncertainty related to the long-run dynamics of portfolio-speci.c and market cash .ows and discount rates. We decompose market betas into four sub-betas (as- sociated with assets.and market.s cash .ows and discount rates)...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of parameter instability tests in regressions with 1(1) processes to discriminate between changes in the cointegrating relationship and changes in the marginal distribution of the regressors. Using annual data for the G-7 countries and the...

We test for contagion between pairs of East Asian equity markets over the period 1990-2007.We develop an econometric methodology that allows us to test for both 'shift'and 'pure' contagion within a unified framework. Using both Hong Kong and Thailand as potential shock sources, we find strong...

We examine if the benefits of international portfolio diversification are robust to time-varying asset return volatility. Since diversified portfolios are subject to common cross-country shocks, we focus on the transmission mechanism of such shocks in the presence of regime-switching volatility....