BEA is studying proposals to change the treatment of insurance services in the national accounts. There are 5 proposed changes: investment income will be added as a supplement to the premiums paid by policyholders; investment income is to include interest, dividends and capital gains; a measure of expected investment income will be incorporated; a measure of expected claims will be incorporated...

Various alternatives are available when designing a data collection system for portfolio investment (PI) statistics, in the context of balance of payments (BOP) and international investment position (IIP). Such systems differ according to the reporting agents they target, periodicity and level of aggregation, while the corresponding results vary in terms of implementation and running costs, ava...

The Australian coal industry has been described as being a perpetual case of ‘profitless prosperity’. This implies that foreign companies invest in low-margin mining activities with motives other than profit. It is argued that foreign investors and Japanese trading companies in particular used government investment concessions and subsidies to help create oversupply in the seaborne coal market....

Presumably, hedge fund managers pursue unique strategies because they have great new ideas and superior investment skills, while less skilled managers are more likely to herd and follow publicly known investment ideas. For investors, knowing how innovative and skillful their managers are is thus extremely important but very difficult because of the opaque nature of hedge fund operations. In thi...

Hedge fund databases vary as to the type of funds to include and in their classification scheme. Investment strategy and/or investment style are the basis for classification. Considerable variation is observed in the definitions, return calculation methodologies, and assumptions. There exists a myriad of classifications, some overlapping and some mutually exclusive. There is a need for an ‘alte...

This paper studies capital adjustment costs. Our goal here is to characterize these adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for parameters that minimize ex post errors in an Euler equation. This strategy is quite common in models for which adjust...

Chart patterns and indicators are popular technical tools for making investment decisions. This article presents a trading strategy combining price movement patterns, candlestick chart patterns, and trading indicators, including Moving Average, Exponential Moving Average, Bollinger Bands, On Balance Volume, Relative Strength Index, Moving Average Convergence Divergence, and Stochastic Oscillato...

This paper studies a nonlinear control policy for multi-period investment. The nonlinear strategy we develop is categorized as a kernel method, but solving large-scale instances of the resulting optimization problem in a direct manner is computationally intractable in the literature. In order to overcome this difficulty, we employ a dimensionality reduction technique which is often used in prin...

T he importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries has begun to spread very rapidly, especially after the transition of command economies countries into open markets. Many countries see attracting FDI as an important element in their strategy for economic growth because FDI is widely regarded as an amalgamation of capital, technology, marketing, and management...

This paper studies how the difference between technical depreciation and tax depreciation affects the firm’s optimal investment strategy. The objective is maximization of shareholder value. When tax depreciation differs from technical depreciation, an additional investment not only generates value due to the fact that the firm can produce more, but also due to the fact that an additional deferr...