This research analyses through the use of instrumental variables estimation whether democracy has an effect on variables belonging to three different categories: fiscal policy, inequality in income distribution and political instability. It shows there is no stable relation between democracy and fiscal policy variables between countries of the sample in the 1978-1988 period. Democracy, on the o...

This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colonial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We …nd that the share of European descendants can explain more than half of the di¤erence in measures of democracy betwe...

This paper investigates the effect of stock market microstructure on managerial compensation schemes. We propose and empirically demonstrate that the sensitivity of chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) compensations to changes in stockholders’ value is higher when the stock market facilitates the production and aggregation of private or public information. Using stock trading data and analysts’ ea...

This paper examines the hypothesis that both stock returns and volatility are asymmetric functions of past information derived from domestic and US stock-market news. The evidence finds the presence of negative autocorrelation, which is consistent with the dominance of positive-feedback trading behavior. By employing a double-threshold autoregressive GARCH model to investigate four major index-...

s tock returns of companies listed on the stock exchange is one of the most important criteria in assessing the macroeconomic. this study investigates the effect of exchange rate volatility on the stock exchange returns of d8 countries. it takes monthly data during the period (2008:1-2015:6) constituting 90 observations. at first we used panel-garch model to estimate exchange rate volatility in...

We report on two anomalous trends in the temperature dependences of the splay (K11) and bend (K33) elastic constants in the nematic (N) phase of mixtures of compounds with rodlike (R) and bent-core (BC) molecules: As the sample is cooled from the isotropic to N transition point, (i) K33 increases, attains a maximum value and then decreases, and (ii) close to the N to smectic A (SmA) transition ...

Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of ...

Assuming elliptically contoured distribution for portfolio asset returns, we derive the exact marginal and joint densities of the global minimum variance portfolio variance, and weights estimators. We also construct a test for the hypothesis that the global minimum variance is less then or equal to a certain value. A stochastic representation and moments of its estimator is provided. We illustr...

Regional Economic Growth and Human Capital: The Role of Overeducation The paper analyses the link between human capital and regional economic growth in the European Union. Using various indicators of human capital calculated from census microdata, we conclude that the recent economic performance of European regions is associated with an increase in overeducation. In fact, measures of educationa...

We develop a multivariate generalization of the Markov–switching GARCH model introduced by Haas, Mittnik, and Paolella (2004b) and derive its fourth– moment structure. An application to international stock markets illustrates the relevance of accounting for volatility regimes from both a statistical and economic perspective, including out–of–sample portfolio selection and computation of Value– ...