From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

This paper considers Bayesian regression with normal and doubleexponential priors as forecasting methods based on large panels of time series. We show that, empirically, these forecasts are highly correlated with principal component forecasts and that they perform equally well for a wide range...

Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

From a banking supervisory perspective, this paper analyses aspects of market risk of an aggregated trading portfolio comprised of the trading books of 11 German banks with a regulatory approved internal market risk model. Based on real, clean profit and loss data and Value-at-Risk estimates of...

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...

This paper presents a novel Bayesian method for estimating dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models subject to a constrained posterior distribution of the implied Sharpe ratio. We apply our methodology to a DSGE model with habit formation in consumption and leisure, using an estimate...

Distinguishing pure supply effects from other determinants of price and quantity in the market for loans is a notoriously difficult problem. Using German data, we employ Bayesian vector autoregressive models with sign restrictions on the impulse response functions in order to enquire the role of...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

We focus on a quantitative assessment of rigid labor markets in an environment of stable monetary policy. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process and derive monetary policy implications. Towards that aim, we structurally model matching frictions and rigid wages...

This paper addresses the relative importance of monetary indicators for forecasting inflation in the euro area in a Bayesian framework. Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA)based on predictive likelihoods provides a framework that allows for the estimation of inclusion probabilities of a particular...