We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varyinglinkages among the Irish stock market, one of the top world performers of the 1990s, and the US andUK stock markets. We ¯nd that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required...

A growing number of studies in finance decompose multi-period buy-and-hold portfolioreturns into a series of single period returns. The method used to decomposethese returns is important because researchers use them in tests of asset pricing modelsand market efficiency and in evaluating the...

We address one interesting case — the predictability of excess US asset returns from macroeconomic factors within a flexible regime switching VAR framework — in which the presence of regimes may lead to superior forecasting performance from forecast combinations. After having documented that...