This essay surveys macroeconomic issues that marked the transition from centrally planned to market economy in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. We first establish a set of stylized facts of the transition so far, namely: (1) output fell, (2) capital shrank, (3)...

Structural transformation refers to the reallocation of economic activity across the broad sectors agriculture, manufacturing and services. This review article synthesizes and evaluates recent advances in the research on structural transformation. We begin by presenting the stylized facts of...

This paper examines the business cycle properties of a small set of real US macroeconomic time series using a variety of detrending methods. It is shown: (i) that both quantitatively and qualitatively `stylized facts' of US business cycles vary widely across detrending methods; (ii) that...

This work develops change-point methods for statistics of high-frequency data. The main interest is the volatility of an Itˆo semi-martingale, which is discretely observed over a fixed time horizon. We construct a minimax-optimal test to discriminate different smoothness classes of the...

Information flows across international financial markets typically occur within hours, making volatility spillover appear contemporaneous in daily data. Such simultaneous transmission of variances is featured by the stochastic volatility model developed in this paper, in contrast to usually...

Basel II Pillar 3 reports provide information about banks' exposure towards a number of risk factors, such as corporate credit risk and interest rate risk. Previous studies nd that the quality of such information is likely to be weak. We analyze the marginal contribution of pillar 3 exposure...

We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don’t know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms....

We analyze the theoretical moments of a nonlinear approximation to a model of business cycles and asset pricing with stochastic volatility and recursive preferences. We find that heteroskedastic volatility operationalizes a time-varying risk adjustment channel that induces variability in...

In this paper we study the detailed distributional properties of integrated non-Gaussian OU (intOU) processes. Both exact results and approximate results are given. We emphasise the study of the tail behaviour of the intOU process. Our results have many potential applications in financial...

The availability of intra-data on the prices of speculative assets means that we can use quadratic variation like measures of activity in financial markets, called realised volatility, to study the stochastic properties of returns. Here we derive the moments and the asymptotic distribution of...