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Once upon a time, there were roaming charges and disgruntled consumers. As a result of a preliminary ruling1 concerning the validity of a legislative measure2 on roaming on public mobile telephone networks within the European Union (hereinafter 'Union'), the regulation of roaming charges may have been changed forever. The reference had been made in proceedings between operators of public mobile telephone networks, including Vodafone Ltd, Telefónica O2 Europe plc, T-Mobile International AG, and Orange Personal Communications Services Ltd, and the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The roaming regulation aimed to cap the wholesale and retail charges mobile operators could charge for the provision of roaming services on public mobile networks for voice calls between Member States. The validity of the roaming regulation was challenged on three grounds, namely that its legal basis was inadequate, that it infringed the principle of proportionality, and that it offended the principle of subsidiarity. It was left to the Court of Justice to seal the fate of the roaming consumers.

"A publication devoted to the promotion of scientific principles of government." ; Publication suspended May 1918-Sept. 1921, 1953?, 1960. ; Includes supplements. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; BANC; F869.S3.C58: For partial analytics see Bancroft shelf list

The parameters of popular multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) models are restricted so that their estimation is feasible in large systems and covariance stationarity and positive definiteness of conditional covariance matrices are guaranteed. These restrictions limit the dynamics that the models can represent, assuming, for example, that volatilities evolve in an univariate fashion, not being related neither among them nor with the correlations. This paper updates previous surveyson parametric MGARCH models focusing on their limitations to represent the dynamics observed in real systems of financial returns. The conclusions are illustrated using simulated data and a five-dimensional system of exchange rate returns. ; The first author was supported by grants of 0969/13-3 CAPES, Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel. The second author acknowledges financial support from CAPES, grant 10600/13-2, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant 2013/00506-1, and Laboratory EPIFISMA. Financial support from ECO2012-32401 project by the Spanish Government is gratefully acknowledged by the third author.

The consumption growth beta of an investment strategy that goes long in high interest rate currencies and short in low interest rate currencies is large and significant. Consumption risk price differs significantly from zero, even after accounting for the sampling uncertainty introduced by the estimation of the consumption betas. The constant in the regression of average returns on consumption betas is not significant. Additionally, this investment strategy's consumption and market betas increase during recessions and times of crisis, when risk prices are high, implying that the unconditional betas understate its riskiness. JEL: C58, E21, F31, G11, G12

Lustig and Verdelhan (2007) argue that the excess returns to borrowing US dollars and lending in foreign currency "compensate US investors for taking on more US consumption growth risk," yet the stochastic discount factor corresponding to their benchmark model is approximately uncorrelated with the returns they study. Hence, one cannot reject the null hypothesis that their model explains none of the cross sectional variation of the expected returns. Given this finding, and other evidence, I argue that the forward premium puzzle remains a puzzle. JEL: C58, E21, F31, G11, G12

Counter to extant stylized facts, using newly available data on country allocations in US investors' foreign equity portfolios we find that (i) US investors do not exhibit returns-chasing behavior, but, consistent with partial portfolio rebalancing, tend to sell past winners; and (ii) US investors increase portfolio weights on a country's equity market just prior to its strong performance, behavior inconsistent with an informational disadvantage. Over the past two decades, US investors' foreign equity portfolios outperformed a value-weighted foreign benchmark by 160 basis points per year. JEL: C58, G11, G15