We study the dependence between the downside risk of European banks and insurers. Since the downside risk of banks and insurers differs, an interesting question from a supervisory point of view is the risk reduction that derives from diversification within large banks and financial...

The issue of whether the public sector enhances or retards long-run economic growth has been debated passionately in recent years. In this paper we use meta-analysis to shed light on the issue. A sample of 93 published studies, yielding 123 meta-observations, is used to examine the robustness of...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this nonparametric measure is not predisposed toward the normal distribution and can allow for nonlinear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries suggest...

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’...

Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts. Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on three questions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts and model forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and occupational choice are mentioned as driving both the level of (entrepreneurial) income and of education. Using instrumental...

A class of adaptive sampling methods is introduced for efficient posterior and predictive simulation. The proposed methods are robust in the sense that they can handle target distributions that exhibit non-elliptical shapes such as multimodality and skewness. The basic method makes use of...

The empirical support for a real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure. This procedure makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class of

Strategic choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior distributions. A comparative analysis is presented of possible advantages and limitations of different simulation...