Previous research suggests that credit rating announcements by Moody’s are anticipated by participants in the credit default swap market. In particular, it is argued that downgrades and negative outlook reports do not contain significant information, but there seems to be anticipation of both types of ratings announcements. In this paper, we examine credit default swap spread changes conditiona...

There now exist several theoretical technologies for treating weak decays of heavy flavour hadrons that are genuinely based on QCD without having to invoke a deus ex machina. I focus on one of those, which employs an expansion in inverse powers of the heavy quark mass. It has developed into a rather mature framework incorporating many subtle aspects of quantum field theory. I describe its metho...

The Internet is not only a significant communication medium, it is also largely used as a channel of distribution. In the very beginning of the e-commerce era, most researchers and practitioners forecasted a sharp increase in Internet-based commercial applications, leading to a threat of existing business models. Already in 1980, Rosenberg and Hirschmann argued that in-home shopping could threa...

Government agencies and other national and international institutions are asked to perform forecasts over the medium term. In particular, the EU Stability and Growth Pact contains the obligation to formulate stability programmes over four years, covering a general economic outlook as well as the projected development of public fi nances. However, the current practice of performing medium-term e...

The present study investigated the inflation growth nexus in the context of BRICS countries. The study used time series data covering from the period 1980 to 2012. The data sources are cumulated from the World Bank, World Economic Outlook (WEO). The empirical findings of the study indicate that a long run positive relationship between inflation and economic growth only for China and South Afric...

We review, from the point of view of credit risk management, classical Extreme Value Theory in its one–dimensional (EVT) as well as more–dimensional (MEVT) setup. The presentation is highly coloured by the current economic crisis against which background we discuss the (non–)usefulness of certain methodological developments. We further present an outlook on current and future research for the m...

The emerging market China is currently one of the most attractive and promising markets in the world. Many investors want to benefit from the high growth and promising economic outlook and therefore invest in China equity funds. However, both opportunity and risk factors need to be taken into consideration, and we have concluded that most of the Chinese market’s opportunities can be derived bac...

The purpose of this report is to present qualitative and quantitative information on the situation and outlook for the Hawaii beef industry. Since 1986, Hawaii’s market share of the local beef market has decreased from about 30 percent to less than 10 percent. Hawaii cannot com­ pete in the production of grain-finished beef from the mainland USA because of the high cost of inputs here. Currentl...