One of the most important duties of financial economy is modeling and forecasting the volatilities of price of risky assets. From analysts and policy makers’ view, price volatility is a key variable contributing to perception of market volatilities. Therefore, analysts need to have an appropriate of forecast of price volatility as a necessary input to perform duties such as risk management, por...

This is a very nice paper. The main points are important, the structure is simple and clear, and I find the key arguments persuasive. In my comments I’m going to begin by summarizing the heart of the Orphanides-Williams argument. Then I will locate their paper within the rapidly growing literature on learning and monetary policy. Finally I will return to their paper and offer a number of specif...

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding optimal portfolios in cases when the underlying probability model is not perfectly known. For the sake of robustness, a maximin approach is applied which uses a ”confidence set” for the probability distribution. The approach shows the tradeoff between return, risk and robustness in view of the model ambiguity. As a consequence, a monetary value ...

The Sovereign Money Initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people in 2018. This paper reviews the arguments behind the initiative and discusses its potential impact. I argue that several arguments are inconsistent with empirical evidence or with economic logic. In particular, controlling sight deposits neither stabilizes credit nor avoids financial crises. Also, assuming that deposits at the...

There is little risk of deflation and a liquidity trap in the euro area. Inflation and short-and long-term inflation expectations are relatively close to 2% per year. With the current short nominal interest rate at 2%, there is ample room for more expansionary monetary policy if needed, and there is no reason to doubt the effectiveness of standard monetary policy in the euro area. Although temp...

BACKGROUND A systematic review on the use of incentives to promote questionnaire return in clinical trials suggest they are effective, but not all studies have sufficient funds to use them. Promising an incentive once data are returned can reduce the cost-burden of this approach, with possible further cost-savings if the offer were restricted to reminder letters only. This study aimed to evalua...

A more holistic understanding of the benefits of sight-restoring cataract surgery requires a focus that goes beyond income and employment, to include a wider array of well-being measures. The objective of this study is to examine the monetary and non-monetary benefits of cataract surgery on both patients as well as their caregivers in Vietnam. Participants were randomly recruited from a Ho-Chi-...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a system paradigm that structures business functions as loosely coupled services to enable business agility. SOA requires significant up-front investments, and in return, promises a vast array of benefits. Unfortunately, in contrast to the costs of the investment, monetary benefits associated with SOA are more difficult to measure. For one reason, benefits...

This paper studies a New Keynesian model in which monetary policy may switch between regimes. We derive sufficient conditions for indeterminacy that are easy to implement and we show that the necessary and sufficient condition for determinacy, provided by Davig and Leeper, is necessary but not sufficient. More importantly, we use a two-regime model to show that indeterminacy in a passive regime...