We provide a first in-depth look at robust estimation of integrated quarticity (IQ) based on high frequency data. IQ is the key ingredient enabling inference about volatility and the presence of jumps in financial time series and is thus of considerable interest in applications. We document the...

We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk across stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures...

The carry trade is the investment strategy of going long in high-yield target currencies and short in low-yield funding currencies. Recently, this naive trade has seen very high returns for long periods, followed by large crash losses after large depreciations of the target currencies. Based on...

A wave of recent research has studied the predictability of foreign currency returns. A wide variety of forecasting structures have been proposed, including signals such as carry, value, momentum, and the forward curve. Some of these have been explored individually, and others have been used in...

This paper develops asymptotic econometric theory to help understand data generated by a present value model with a discount factor near one. A leading application is to exchange rate models. A key assumption of the asymptotic theory is that the discount factor approaches 1 as the sample size...

We study the nature of systemic sovereign credit risk using CDS spreads for the U.S. Treasury, individual U.S. states, and major European countries. Using a multifactor affine framework that allows for both systemic and sovereign-specific credit shocks, we find that there is considerable...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Three shocks, distinguished by whether their effects are permanent or transitory, are identified to characterize the post-war dynamics of aggregate consumer spending, labor earnings, and household wealth. The first shock accounts for virtually all of the variation in consumption; we argue that...

This paper introduces new nonparametric statistical methods to evaluate zero-cost investment strategies. We focus on directional trading strategies, risk-adjusted returns, and the investor's decisions under uncertainty as the core of our analysis. By relying on classification tools with a long...

This paper considers a moments based non-linear estimator that is root-T consistent and uniformly asymptotically normal irrespective of the degree of persistence of the forcing process. These properties hold for linear autoregressive models, linear predictive regressions, as well as certain...