Is the imprecision of economic forecasts due to the judgements of biased decision makers? This study explores decision making among expert forecasters in Sweden using semistructured interviews. The results indicate that forecasters' decision processes are characterised by intuitive, as well as...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of six types of policy rules applied for Indonesia, using monthly data spanning January 1980 to December 2008. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses deterministic simulations on a small macro model and evaluates the...

In this paper, we focus on the Granger causality test in the presence of regime shift. We apply a vector autoregressive (4) model on Swedish series of industrial output and consumer price index for the period 1980:1-1998:6. To test for causality, three different test methods namely the single...

Forecasts guide decisions in all areas of economics and finance and their value can only be understood in relation to, and in the context of, such decisions. We discuss the central role of the loss function in helping determine the forecaster's objectives and use this to present a unified...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Design/methodology/approach – Two econometric approaches are used: cross-country regressions for a sample of 50 countries and time-series estimators for the USA....

This paper examines the time-varying behaviour of beta risk and degree of volatility persistence in the daily stock returns of 30 industry portfolios consisting of firms from the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ stock exchanges. Using an exponential ARCH (EGARCH) for this purpose, it further examines the...

This paper addresses the problem of portfolio selection under a multifactor asset return model, using Bayesian analysis to deal with uncertainties in parameter estimation and model specification. These sources of error are ignored in the classical mean-variance method. We apply two approaches:...

Many surveys analyse the volatility of stock market indexes, omitting the role of individual stocks in that phenomenon. In the present study, we focus on that part of the market, using financial and market data from listed firms in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) index in several crashes, during...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to see if a difference exists between the impact of the subprime crisis on countries with more transparency and more regulated finance than on others. A further objective is to explain the success of the Brazilian case in avoiding the financial crisis and...