Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has attracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The...

This survey focuses on two families of nonlinear vector time series models, the family of Vector Threshold Regression models and that of Vector Smooth Transition Regression models. These two model classes contain incomplete models in the sense that strongly exogeneous variables are allowed in...

The GARCH framework has been used for option pricing with quite some success. While the initial work assumed conditional Gaussian innovations, recent contributions relax this assumption and allow for more flexible parametric specifications of the underlying distribution. However, until now the...

Conventional structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models with Gaussian errors are not identified, and additional identifying restrictions are typically imposed in applied work. We show that the Gaussian case is an exception in that a SVAR model whose error vector consists of independent...

This paper applies three universal approximators for forecasting. They are the Artificial Neural Networks, the Kolmogorov-Gabor polynomials, as well as the Elliptic Basis Function Networks. Even though forecast combination has a long history in econometrics focus has not been on proving loss...

In this paper we propose a feasible way to price American options in a model with time varying volatility and conditional skewness and leptokurtosis using GARCH processes and the Normal Inverse Gaussian distribution. We show how the risk neutral dynamics can be obtained in this model, we...

In this paper, nonlinear models are restricted to mean nonlinear parametric models. Several such models popular in time series econometrics are presented and some of their properties discussed. This includes two models based on universal approximators: the Kolmogorov-Gabor polynomial model and...

We analyze the applicability of economic criteria for volatility forecast evaluation based on unconditional measures of portfolio performance. The main theoretical finding is that such unconditional measures generally fail to rank conditional forecasts correctly due to the presence of a bias...

What drives volatility on financial markets? This paper takes a comprehensive look at the predictability of financial market volatility by macroeconomic and financial variables. We go beyond forecasting stock market volatility (by large the focus in previous studies) and additionally investigate...