It is now well established that the volatility of asset returns is time varying and highly persistent. One leading model that is used to represent these features of the data is the stochastic volatility model. The researcher may test for non-stationarity of the volatility process by testing for a unit root in the log-squared time series. This strategy for inference has many advantages, but is n...

After the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007, severe fire sales of assets in the financial sector are accompanied by a rise in the volatility of asset returns in the non-financial firms. To account for their co-movements, I develop a model that highlights the interaction between the financial health of the banking sector and the volatility of asset returns. The novel feature of the model is...

We establish several new findings on the relation between open interest in commodity markets and asset returns. High commodity market activity, as measured by high open-interest growth, predicts high commodity returns and low bond returns. Openinterest growth is a more powerful and robust predictor of commodity returns than other known predictors such as the short rate, the yield spread, the ba...

BACKGROUND Universal health coverage is high on national health agendas of many countries at the moment. Absence of financial hardship is a key component of universal health coverage and should be monitored regularly. However, relevant household survey data, which is traditionally needed for this analysis is not frequently collected in most countries and in some countries, has not been collecte...

This paper investigates the role of liquidity. It is argued that the firm holds money as a guarantee of solvency to its contractual partners. By holding liquid assets the firm is able to increase the efficiency of its contracts. Variations in the opportunity cost of holding money cause variations in the firm’s demand for money and consequent variations in the frequency of contract failures, Thi...

We study an equilibrium in which agents face surprise liquidity shocks and invest in liquid and illiquid riskless assets. The random holding horizon from liquidity shocks makes the return of the illiquid security risky. The equilibrium premium for such risk depends on the constraint that agents face when borrowing against future income; it is insignificant without borrowing constraint, but can ...

We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance sheets—i.e., banks with lower ratios of securities to assets. Moreover, this pattern is largely attributable to the smaller banks, those in t...

We investigate the stochastic dynamics of bank liquidity parameters such as liquid assets and nett cash outflow in relation to the global financial crisis. These parameters enable us to determine the liquidity coverage ratio that is one of themetrics used in ratio analysis to measure bank liquidity. In this regard, numerical results show that bank behavior related to liquidity was highly procyc...