in the recent economic literature, an important finding is the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth. before the 1970s, the most of economists believed that economic growth could be reached only by accumulation of physical capital. in the 1970s and after the pioneering works of mckinon (1973) and shaw (1973), this orthodox view was criticized by a vast amount of ...

We exploit a novel setting in which the same piece of information affects two sets of firms: one set of firms requires straightforward processing to update prices, while the other set requires more complicated analyses to incorporate the same piece of information into prices. We document substantial return predictability from the set of easy-to-analyze firms to their more complicated peers. Spe...

This paper proposes an improved procedure for stochastic volatility model estimation with an application in risk management. This procedure is composed of the following instrumental components: Fourier transform method for volatility estimation with a price correction scheme, and importance sampling for extremal event probability estimation with applications to estimate Value-at-Risk and condit...

I study optimal monetary policy in an expectational Phillips Curve environment in which private agents optimally choose their amount of information pertinent to predicting policy. ARCH shocks produce interesting information acquisition (IA) dynamics. Under discretion, IA dynamics cause time-varying effectiveness of policy because of the expectational Phillips Curve; policy may be rendered compl...

The general-to-specific (GETS) approach to modelling is widely employed in the modelling of economic series, but less so in financial volatility modelling due to computational complexity when many explanatory variables are involved. This study proposes a simple way of avoiding this problem and undertakes an out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the methodology applied to the modelling of weekly ...

This study analyzes the market quality differences, in terms of liquidity and volatility, between Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and non-REIT common stocks. The 2008 financial crisis has significantly influenced the market quality for REITs. Our findings reveal intraday patterns indicating a lower liquidity, higher volatility, and greater price impact for REITs than nonREITs for pre-cris...

In the nineteenseventies, James Tobin suggested the introduction of a transaction tax on the currency market to cope with exchange rate volatility. We investigate the consequences of the introduction of such a tax on an asset market model from a game-theoretic and an experimental point of view. Our main results include in respect to our model that contrary to the situation in game-theoretic equ...

Using sovereign CDS spreads and currency option data for Mexico and Brazil, we document that CDS spreads covary with both the currency option implied volatility and the slope of the implied volatility curve in moneyness. We propose a joint valuation framework, in which currency return variance and sovereign default intensity follow a bivariate diffusion with contemporaneous correlation. Estimat...

This paper examines the hypothesis that both stock returns and volatility are asymmetrical functions of past information from the US market. By employing a double-threshold GARCH model to investigate six major index-return series, we find strong evidence supporting the asymmetrical hypothesis of stock returns. Specifically, negative news from the US market will cause a larger decline in a natio...

We propose a model with heterogeneous interacting traders which can explain some of the stylized facts of stock market returns. In the model, synchronization effects, which generate large fluctuations in returns, can arise purely from communication and imitation among traders. The key element in the model is the introduction of a trade friction which, by responding to price movements, creates a...