This paper investigates the precision of multivariate models of the output gap and considers their implications for the formulation of macroeconomic policy. Multivariate models identify the gap by including information from structural economic relationships, such as Okun's Law, the Phillips...

The lack of euro area labour market flexibility is a commonly mentioned issue. In particular, the relatively weak response of wages to high unemployment can pose adjustment problems. We address the issue using extensive simulations of an estimated macro-econometric model for the euro area (the...

We wish to understand the implications of recent shifts in US productivity for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules. Accordingly, we augment a standard inflation targeting model in which a forward-looking version of the Taylor rule constitutes the optimal monetary policy with regime...

In this paper we model Value-at-Risk (VaR) for daily stock index returns using a collection of parametric models of the ARCH family based on the skewed Student distribution. We show that models that rely on a symmetric density distribution for the error term underperform with respect to skewed...

We perform a Monte Carlo experimet to compare four different Value-at-Risk methodologies, RiskMetrics, Gaussian GARCH(1,1), Generalized Student-t APARCH(1,1), and ARCH(1) Quantile, under five different data generating processes. The ARCH(1) Quantile methodology does not assume any distribution...

The objective of this paper is to calculate, model, and forecast realized volatility using high-frequency stock-market index data. The approach differs from existing ones in several ways. First, it is shown that the decay of the serial dependence of high-frequency returns on the sampling...