Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) has recently been discussed in the financial literature as an effective way to account for model uncertainty. In this paper we compare BMA to a new model uncertainty framework introduced by Yang (2004), called Aggregate Forecasting Through Exponential Reweighting,...

With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...

This paper shows that in financial markets with endogenous asset supply and demand, both rational and noise traders do coexist in the long run. The finding implies that financial markets are neither informationally nor allocationally efficient. While rational traders have a consistently higher...

We propose an affine term structure model which accommodates non-linearities in the drift and volatility function of the short-term interest rate. Such non-linearities are a consequence of discrete beta-distributed regime shifts constructed on multiple thresholds. We derive iterative closed form...

This paper introduces an expected value estimator with expert knowledge to the robust estimation of sovereign rating transitions which are characterised by few observations. Ourestimates of default premia within Mexican, Colombian and Brazilian Eurobond yield spreads provide a better fit than...

Interest rate derivatives are among the most actively traded financial instruments in the main currency areas. With values of positions reacting immediately to the underlying index of daily interbank rates, manipulation has become an increasing challenge for the operational implementation of...

The validation of probability calibration is an inherently difficult task. We develop a testing procedure for credit-scoring models. The models comprise two components to check whether the ex-ante probabilities support the ex-post frequencies. The first component tests the level of the...

In this paper we develop a structural equation model with latent variables in an ordinal setting which allows us to test broker-dealer predictive ability of financial market movements. We use a multivariate logit model in a latent factor framework, develop a tractable estimator based on a...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...