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This paper provides evidence regarding the impact of soft information on foreign bank efficiency in the ASEAN-5 market in the years following the Asian crisis. The analysis presented here develops previous literature by disaggregating soft information into five difference types and examining whether institutional quality (proxied for by host-country economic risk stability index) mitigates the impact. Using a three-stage estimation process we find that soft information does indeed affect foreign banks’ efficiencies in an identifiable manner, but host-country institutional quality acts so as to significantly lessen the effect.

The aim of this paper is to develop a macroeconometric model for emerging economies as in the case of Bahrain (the most open economy in GCC region) to measure the impact of human capital investment on key macroeconomic indicators (1990 through 2016). The paper also makes an attempt to forecast the effects of changes in government spending on education as a percentage of GDP on the country’s key macroeconomic variables through simulation under 3 different scenarios for the next five years. The main findings point out that an increase in government spending on education over time has a positive influence on human capital in terms of increased employment along with positive effect on output, private investments and consumption whilst contributing to lower inflation rate.

We investigate the performance of Value at Risk (VaR) models at measuring risk for WTI oil one-month futures returns. VaR models are used to calculate commodity market risk at extreme quantiles: 0.95, 0.99, 0.995 and 0.999 for both long and short trading positions. Widespread VaR models do not provide adequate risk coverage and their performance is especially weak for short position in oil. Conditional and unconditional extreme value theory VaR models are found to be the only ones correctly forecasting the true level of upside and downside risk. We also investigate the closeness of fit of theoretical distributions to the extreme tails of oil returns. Results show that generalised Pareto distribution provides the best fit to both tails of oil returns although tails differ significantly, with the right tail having a higher tail index, indicative of more extreme events.

We propose an optimisation approach for determining the optimal decay factor in time weighted (BRW) simulation. The backtesting of the BRW simulation, which involves different decay factors, together with a broad range of competing VaR models, has been performed on a sample of seven stock indexes and two commodities: gold and WTI oil. The results obtained show that the BRW simulation with an optimised decay factor relative to the Lopez (1998) size-adjusted function is among the best performing VaR models, second only to the conditional extreme value approach ( McNeil & Frey, 2000 ). The optimised decay factors are sufficiently stable over time, giving economic justification to the optimisation because they do not change over longer time periods. Unlike most of the VaR models tested, in the large majority of cases, the optimised BRW model passes the Basel II criteria but yields significantly lower VaR forecasts than the extreme value approaches, thus resulting in a lower idle capital, i.e. lower costs.