It is obvious that forecasts are of great importance and widely used in economics and finance. Quite simply, good forecasts lead to good decisions. The importance of forecast evaluation and combination techniques follows immediately -- forecast users naturally have a keen interest in monitoring...

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in modeling volatility fluctuations. ARCH models, for example, provide parsimonious approximations to volatility dynamics. Here we provide a selective amount of certain aspects of conditional volatility modeling that are of particular relevance in...