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...

This paper presents annual stock market capitalization data for 17 advanced economies from 1870 to today. Extending our knowledge beyond individual benchmark years in the seminal work of Rajan and Zingales (2003) reveals a striking new time series pattern: over the long run, the evolution of...

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) –...

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...

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...

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...

World War I was fought by numerous countries siding together as the Central Powers and, respectively, the Allied Powers. The former established around the German Empire and Austria-Hungary and grew to four allies when the Ottoman Empire in late 1914 and Bulgaria in late 1915 entered the scene;...

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...