Luc Bauwens is Professor of Economics at the Universit?? catholique de Louvain, Belgium where he chairs the Department of Economics, and has been co-director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) from 1992 to 1998. He has published several books and papers in the fields of Bayesian inference, time series methods, simulation and numerical methods in econometrics, as well as empirical finance and international trade. Pierre Giot is Professor of Econometrics and Quantitative Finance at Maastricht University in The Netherlands, and he is a member of CORE in Belgium. After g...