Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

Housing and pension wealth are shown to be important determinants of personal sector consumption and retirement behaviour in the UK. Housing and state pension wealth have a positive effect on consumption, while private pension wealth promotes greater savings. Greater private defined benefit...

We look into the available macroeconomic figures and the predictions made about the recession in Greece by international organizations, Greek research centers, and the Greek government; and suggest that the predictions regarding the decline in real GDP in recent years were overly optimistic. The...

We analyse the Generalised Hyperbolic distribution as a model for fat tails and asymmetries in multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models. We provide a standardised version of this distribution, obtain analytical expressions for the log-likelihood score, and explain how...

A well known result is that the Gaussian log-likelihood can be expressed as the sum over different frequency components. This implies that the likelihood ratio statistic has a similar linear decomposition. We exploit these observations to devise diagnostic methods that are useful for...

Evidence that asset returns are more highly correlated during volatile markets and during market downturns (see Longin and Solnik, 2001, and Ang and Chen, 2002) has lead some researchers to propose alternative models of dependence. In this paper we develop two simple goodness-of-fit tests for...

We contribute to the growing empirical literature on monetary and fiscal interactions by applying a sign restriction identification scheme to a structural TVP-VAR in order to disentangle and evaluate the policy shocks and policy transmissions. This in turn allows us to study the Great Recession...

We contribute to the growing empirical literature on monetary and fiscal interactions by applying a sign restriction identification scheme to a structural TVP-VAR in order to disentangle and evaluate the policy shocks and policy transmissions. This in turn allows us to study the Great Recession...

One of the most important findings in empirical finance has been the fact that returns are not i.i.d. Predictability, or time variation in the conditional distribution of returns, is one of the basic ingredients of asset pricing and portfolio choice models nowadays. Under the current renewed...