The importance of country risk is underscored by the existence of several prominent country risk rating agencies. These agencies combine information regarding alternative measures of economic, financial and political risk into associated composite risk ratings. As the accuracy of such country risk measures is open to question, it is necessary to analyse the agency rating systems to enable an evaluation of the importance and relevance of agency risk ratings. The book focuses on the rating system of the international country risk guide. "Time" series data permit a comparative assessment of risk...

Description innovation is universally recognized as an important source of economic growth. Patents may be considered as a potential measure of innovation. As such, patents may alter isoquant maps, and measuring their elasticities is both intuitively and empirically appealing. This book investigates the impact of U.S.A. patent activity on technical change in 35 industries given in the KLEM (Jorgenson, 1996) data set for the period 1958-1996. Four patent variables, namely total patent applications, total patents granted, unsuccessful patent applications and foreign patents granted, are...

This accessible volume fills a much-needed gap and addresses core issues on how economic and environmental systems are interconnected looking at how economic frameworks and features of environmental systems can be integrated within formal models to address changes and associated resource management issues at appropriate levels: micro level and national or global level.

The more the relationship between economic and environmental systems is studied analytically and empirically, the more aware we become of the gap in our existing knowledge of environmental data and process...

The book comprises of seven up-to-date comprehensive surveys from leading scholars in Econometrics.

This volume presents five survey papers on time series econometrics, and a modern financial econometrics software package. Starting with a survey of recent theoretical developments for time series models with GARCH errors, the contributions go on to examine the bootstrapping of financial time series, developments in futures hedging, measures of fit for rational expectations models, asset pricing with observable stochastic discount factors and a financial econometrics software package for estimating and forecasting ARCH models. Each of the papers blends theoretical and empirical issues,...

Nine scholarly papers examine the economic and legal issues fundamental to the intellectual property debate. Topics include economic incentives to innovate, copyright law and infringement, trademarks, IP rights for artists, indigenous knowledge and university research, new knowledge economy and society, country risk and innovation, and legal protection of IP.

• Includes nine state-of-the-art survey papers including contributions from Jerry Hausman, Gregory K. Leonard, Dora Marinova, Margaret Raven, and Richard Watt
  
• Evaluates the relationships between...

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor. A problem with Ockham's Razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this monograph examines simplicity by asking six questions: What is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the...