In this paper we 'update' the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second, it is...

The capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM) is one of the most popular methods of financial market analysis. But, evidence of the poor empirical performance of the CAPM has accumulated in the literature. For example, based on their empirical results regarding the relation between market Beta and...

We estimate the process underlying the pricing of American options by using higher-order lattices combined with a multigrid method. This paper also tests whether the risk-neutral densities given from American options provide a good forecasting tool. We use a nonparametric test of the densities...

Assessing the discriminative power of rating systems is an important question to banks and to regulators. In this article we analyze the Cumulative Accuracy Profile (CAP) and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) which are both commonly used in practice. We give a test-theoretic...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

In this paper we will be estimating risk-neutral densities (RND) for the largest euro area stock market (the index of which is the German DAX), reporting their statistical properties, and evaluating their forecasting performance. We have applied an innovative test procedure to a new, rich, and...

Risk neutral densities (RND) can be used to forecast the price of the underlying basis for the option, or it may be used to price other derivates based on the same sequence. The method adopted in this paper to calculate the RND is to firts estimate daily the diffusion process of the underlying...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

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...

Conditional heteroskedasticity is an important feature of many macroeconomic and financial time series. Standard residual-based bootstrap procedures for dynamic regression models treat the regression error as i.i.d. These procedures are invalid in the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity....