In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

This paper provides a structural empirical analysis of Dutch auctions of houseplants at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. The data set is unique for Dutch auctions in the sense that it includes observations of all losing bids in an interval adjacent to the winning bid. The size of...

We value rating-triggered step-up bonds with three methods: (i) the Jarrow, Lando and

We consider eight different measures (issued amount, coupon, listed, age, missing

Unobserved components time series models decompose a time series into a trend, a season, a cycle, an irregular disturbance, and possibly other components. These models have been successfully applied to many economic time series. The standard assumption of a linear model, often appropriate after...

This paper considers spot variance path estimation from datasets of intraday high frequency asset prices in the presence of diurnal variance patterns, jumps, leverage effects and microstructure noise. We rely on parametric and nonparametric methods. The estimated spot variance path can be used...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

To gain insights in the current status of the economy, macroeconomic time series are often decomposed into trend, cycle and irregular components. This can be done by nonparametric band-pass filtering methods in the frequency domain or by model-based decompositions based on autoregressive moving...

Although the main interest in the modelling of electricity prices is often on volatility aspects, we argue that stochastic heteroskedastic behaviour in prices can only be modelled correctly when the conditional mean of the time series is properly modelled. In this paper we consider different...