Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles coincide. Recent papers suggest by their empirical research set-up that they do, or at least that defaults and credit spreads...

Accurate prediction of the frequency of extreme events is of primary importance in many financial applications such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) analysis. We propose a semi-parametric method for VaR evaluation. The largest risks are modelled parametrically, while smaller risks are captured by the non-...

The 1997 collapse of the Albanian economy caused by the collapse of economy-wide Ponzi schemes contrasts sharply to its success status as a post-socialist transition country in the years 1992-1996. In this paper, an attempt is made to explain this 'Albanian Paradox'. The specific Albanian...

This paper investigates whether privatization in emerging economies has a significant indirect effect on local stock market development through the resolution of political risk. We argue that a sustained privatization program represents a major political test that gradually resolves uncertainty...

Most stock exchange regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-2009 crisis by

We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the heterogeneity of recessions in monthly U.S. coincident and leading indicator variables. Univariate Markovswitching models indicate that it is appropriate to allow for two distinct recession regimes, corresponding with ‘mild’ and ‘severe’...

This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the A rated journal 'Journal of Business and Economic Statistics'.<p>

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

We propose a new approach to the modelling of the term structure of interest rates. We consider the general dynamic factor model and show how to impose smoothness restrictions on the factor loadings. We further present a statistical procedure based on Wald tests that can be used to find a...