Understanding the dynamics of interest rates and the term structure has important implications for issues as diverse as real economic activity, monetary policy, pricing of interest rate derivative securities and public debt financing. Our paper follows a longstanding tradition of using factor...

Much of the research describing the cross-sectional and time series behavior of asset returns can be characterized as a search for the relevant state variables and also a search for the relevant model specification. Ultimately the scope of such efforts is to find a satisfactory and stable asset...

The development of estimation and forecasting procedures using empirically realistic continuous-time stochastic volatility models is severely hampered by the lack of closed-form expressions for the transition densities of the observed returns. In response to this, Andersen, Bollerslev, Diebold...

Which loss function should be used when estimating and evaluating option valuation models? Many different functions have been suggested, but no standard has emerged. We emphasize that consistency in the choice of loss functions is crucial. First, for any given model, the loss function used in...

Subordinated stochastic processes, also called time deformed stochastic processes, have been proposed in a variety of contexts to describe asset price behavior. They are used when the movement of prices is tied to the number of market transactions, trading volume or the more illusive concept of...

In this paper, we study stochastic volatility models with time deformation. Such processes relate to early work by Mandelbrot and Taylor (1967), Clark (1973), Tauchen and Pitts (1983), among others. In our setup, the latent process of stochastic volatility evolves in a operational time which...

GARCH volatility models with fixed parameters are too restrictive for long time series due to breaks in the volatility process. Flexible alternatives are Markov-switching GARCH and change-point GARCH models. They require estimation by MCMC methods due to the path dependence problem. An unsolved...

This study considers the time series behavior of the U.S. real interest rate from 1961 to 1986. We provide a statistical characterization of the series using the methodology of Hamilton (1989), by allowing three possible regimes affecting both the mean and variance of the series. The results...

In recent years multivariate models for asset returns have received much attention, in particular this is the case for models with time varying volatility. In this paper we consider models of this class and examine their potential when it comes to option pricing. Specifically, we derive the risk...

In this paper, we investigate whether seasonal adjustment procedures are, at least approximately, linear data transformations. This question is important with respect to many issues including estimation of regression models with seasonally adjusted data. We focus on the X-11 program and first...