We establish a relation between stochastic volatility models and the class of generalized hyperbolic distributions. These distributions have been found to fit exceptionally well to the empirical distribution of stock returns. We review the background of hyperbolic distributions and prove...

Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are widely used in financial applications. To decide whether standard parametric restrictions are justified for a given dataset, a statistical test is required. In this paper, we develop such a test based on the linear state space representation. We provide a...

This paper proposes a procedure for testing alternative specifications of the short term interest rate's dynamics which takes into account that according to some restrictions the interest rate is nonstationary, i.e. the traditional test statistic has a non-standard distribution. Moreover, we do...

Daily returns of financial assets are frequently found to exhibit positive autocorrelation at lag 1. When specifying a linear AR(l) conditional mean, one may ask how this predictability affects option prices. We investigate the dependence of option prices on autoregressive dynamics under...

Let a process SI , ... ,ST obey the conditionally heteroskedastic equation St = Vt Et whcrc Et is a random noise and Vt is the volatility coefficient which in turn obeys an autoregression type equation log v t = w + a S t- l + nt with an additional noise nt. We consider the situation which the...

A particular version of the tests of Robinson (1994) for testing stochastic cycles in macroeconomic time series is proposed in this article. The tests have a standard limit distribution and are easy to implement in raw time series. A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted, studying the size and the...

The annual structure of the real GDP in the UK, France, Germany and Italy is examined in this article by means of fractionally integrated techniques. Using a version of a testing procedure due to Robinson (1994), we show that the series can be specified in terms of I(d) statistical models with d...