This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

The correlation between stock markets and interest rates has been discussed in numerous studies in the past, with differing results in terms of strength and direction of the relationship. This paper uses models of the multivariate GARCH type which allow for time-variability and regime changes in...

Asymmetric persistence of accounting income is often tested in a regression of changes in earnings on lagged changes in earnings, including an interaction term for negative changes (see Basu [1997] or Ball et al. [2009] for a recent overview). In this note we propose an alternative, but closely...

The decline of most world commodity prices came to an end in recent months. The aggregate dollar price level was 15 per cent lower in the first quarter of 1999 compared to a year previously, and since autumn 1997 it even decreased by about 30 per cent. Oil prices fell particularly sharply, but...