Article history: Received 23 October 2010 Received in revised form 4 January 2012 Accepted 6 January 2012 Available online 14 January 2012 JEL classification: F10 F12 F14 F16 L22 J24

Modeling financial volatility is an important part of empirical finance. This paper provides a literature review of the most relevant volatility models, with a particular focus on forecasting models. We firstly discuss the empirical foundations of different kinds of volatility. The paper, then, analyses the non-parametric measure of volatility, named realized variance, and its empirical applica...

This paper introduces cointegrating mixed data sampling (CoMiDaS) regressions, generalizing nonlinear MiDaS regressions in the extant literature. Under a linear mixed-frequency data-generating process, MiDaS regressions provide a parsimoniously parameterized nonlinear alternative when the linear forecasting model is over-parameterized and may be infeasible. In spite of potential correlation of ...

This short note examines some time series evidence relating prices of exports and imports to the aggregate US wage over 34 years of falling tariffs starting in the mid 1960s. The cointegrated unit root series lead to error correction and vector autoregression models. The lost protection and changing traded prices lowered the US wage very slightly, by less than 1%. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All right...

This paper addresses how financial development affects product quality and firmlevel exports depending on the firm’s productivity. To this goal, I propose a heterogeneous firms model with endogenous quality, credit constraints and heterogeneous productivity of a firm. I show theoretically and confirm empirically that lower financial constraints result in higher-quality output and higher exports...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...

A MIDAS regression involves a dependent variable observed at a low frequency and independent variables observed at a higher frequency. This paper relates a true high frequency data generating process, where also the dependent variable is observed (hypothetically) at the high frequency, with a MIDAS regression. It is shown that a correctly specified MIDAS regression usually includes lagged depen...

Contract enforcement is probabilistic, but the probability depends on rules and processes. A stimulus to trade may induce traders to alter rules or processes to improve enforcement. In the model of this paper, such a positive knock-on effect occurs when the elasticity of supply of traders is sufficiently high. Negative knock-on is possible when the elasticity is low. Enforcement strategies in c...

Much trade liberalization involves large and small countries. This paper presents a formal comparison of the economic welfare effects for the small and large country from unilateral free trade by the small country, from a free trade agreement, and from preferential access to the large country’s market. I show that it matters for the welfare effects of these strategies whether the small country ...