Shrinkage estimation of <Emphasis Type="Italic">P</Emphasis>(<Emphasis Type="Italic">X</Emphasis><<Emphasis Type="Italic">Y</Emphasis>) in the exponential case with common location parameter

We consider the problem of estimating R=P(X<Y) where X and Y have independent exponential distributions with parameters and respectively and a common location parameter . Assuming that there is a prior guess or estimate R₀, we develop various shrinkage estimators of R that incorporate this prior information. The performance of the new estimators is investigated and compared with the maximum likelihood estimator using Monte Carlo methods. It is found that some of these estimators are very successful in taking advantage of the prior estimate available.Acknowledgments. The authors are grateful to the editor and to the referees for their constructive comments that resulted in a substantial improvement of the paper.     

Return and volatility transmission between world oil prices and stock markets of the GCC countries

This paper investigates the return links and volatility transmission between oil and stock markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries over the period 2005-2010. We employ a recent generalized VAR-GARCH approach which allows for transmissions in return and volatility. In addition, we analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil-stock portfolio holdings. On the whole, our results point to the existence of substantial return and volatility spillovers between world oil prices and GCC stock markets, and appear to be crucial for international portfolio management in the presence of oil price risk.     

Central bank inability and Taylor rule in developing countries

This paper seeks to adjust Taylor rule to mimic an environment that has central bank inability (losses). Moreover, the current paper is aiming at investigating the effect of the new features of Taylor rule within a context of a New-Keynesian model on a developing economy. The current paper concludes that we can utilize Taylor rule within a New-Keynesian model to introduce the influence of the central bank inability on the economy. Central bank inability decreases both expected future real interest rate and expected future real output. On the contrary, it increases expected future nominal interest rate and expected future inflation rate. Moreover, we prove that the effect of central bank inability has larger effect on the expected inflation rate more than the influence of targeted inflation rate.     

Stress testing and corporate finance

The article contributes to the literature on financial fragility, studying how macroeconomic shocks affect supply and demand in the corporate debt market. We take into account the effect of the competitive environment, as well as the risk level, measured by companies’ default rate. The model is estimated using data from the Harmonised BACH database of corporate accounts for large euro area countries on the 1993–2005 period, in order to carry out an illustrative stress testing exercise. We measure the impact of large macroeconomic shocks (a severe recession and a sharp increase in oil prices) on the equilibrium in the debt market.     

THE SLOPE OF THE TERM STRUCTURE OF CREDIT SPREADS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

In this article we analyze the slope of the term structure of credit spreads. We investigate the explanatory role of interest rate, market, and idiosyncratic equity variables that the recent empirical literature highlights as important determinants of credit spread levels. This study extends the analysis and assesses its effect on credit slopes for a sample of corporate bonds. We find that these factors affect credit spreads at short and long maturities in a significantly different way. A closer inspection of the credit spread slope also reveals that it is a useful indicator of the direction of changes in future short‐term credit spreads. This evidence has important implications for the trading and risk management of portfolios of bonds with different maturities.     

Natural disasters and countries' exports: New insights from a new (and an old) database

This paper is the first to uncover in details the impact of different families of disasters on exports from 1979 to 2000 (storms, floods, earthquakes and changes in temperatures). Besides, our paper is the first to compare in a quasi‐systematic way the results across the two data sets at hand, the standard EM‐DAT data and GeoMet data, a newly available data set based on geophysical and meteorological data (European Economic Review, 2013, 58, 18; Journal of Development Economics, 2014, 111, 92). We run series of regressions while accounting progressively for the characteristics of products (all traded goods v/s agriculture ones), the characteristics of the country (size, level of development) and the intensity of the catastrophes. When pooling all countries, and all types of disasters, we do not find any statistical impact on exports. But when focusing on each of them separately and on agricultural goods, the occurrence of an earthquake appears to reduce exports of about 3%, regardless of its location. A windstorm shock, even when it happens to be very severe, has hardly any impact. A flood, on its side, is estimated to reduce export flows of a small country by nearly 3%. The effect of changes in temperatures is ambiguous. All in all, except for temperature‐related disasters, the results are consistent across both data sets, EM‐DAT and GeoMet, although they appear to be slightly more in line with our expectations in the case of GeoMet.