The distinction of risk vs uncertainty as made by Knight has important implications for policy selection. Assuming the former when the latter is relevant can lead to wrong decisions. With the aid of a stylized model that describes a bank's decision on how to allocate loans, the authors discuss...

In this paper, the dynamics of Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P 500) stock price index is analysed within a time-frequency framework over a monthly period 1791:08-2015:05. Using the Empirical Mode Decomposition technique, the S&P 500 stock price index is divided into different frequencies known as...

Financial markets witness high levels of activity at certain times but remain calm at others. This makes the flow of physical time discontinuous. Therefore, to use physical time scales for studying financial time series runs the risk of missing important activities. An alternative approach is to...

The authors re-examine the return-volatility relationship and its dynamics under a new vector autoregression (VAR) identification framework. By analyzing two model-free impliedvolatility indices - the well-established VIX (in the United States) and the recently published VKOSPI (in Korea) - and...

The article examines causal relationships between sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) prices for the BRICS and most important EU economies (Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain) during the European debt crisis. The cross-correlation function (CCF) approach that distinguishes between...

Macroeconomic models that are based on either the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) or behavioral considerations share a core premise: All future market outcomes can be characterized ex ante with a single overarching probability distribution. This paper assesses the empirical relevance of...

In this paper, we elaborate on an idea initially developed by Weitzman (1998) that justifies taking the lowest possible discount rate for far-distant future cash flows. His argument relies on the arbitrary assumption that when the future rate of return of capital (RRC) is uncertain, one should...

In this paper the author proves that the Expected Net Future Value (ENFV) criterion can lead a risk neutral social planner to reject projects that increase expected utility. By contrast, the Expected Net Present Value (ENPV) rule correctly identifies the economic value of the project. While the...

This study illuminates the difference in the intraday return-volume relationships of spot and index futures. The quantile regression analyses show that the widening effect of the spot trading volume on the distribution of spot returns disappears within a short period of time, whereas that of the...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if it holds, market valuations must follow a random walk; hence, the hypothesis is frequently criticized on the basis of empirical evidence against such a prediction. Yet this reasoning incurs what we...