This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Empirical Finance</I> (2005). Vol. 12, issue 3, pages 445-475.<p> The increasing availability of financial market data at intraday frequencies has not only led to the development of improved volatility measurements but has also inspired...</p></i>

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

Market share models for weekly store-level data are useful to understand competitive structures by delivering own and cross price elasticities. These models can however not be used to examine which brands lose share to which brands during a specificperiod of time. It is for this purpose that we...

We propose a modeling framework which allows for creating probability predictions on a future market crash in the medium term, like sometime in the next five days. Our framework draws upon noticeable similarities between stock returns around a financial market crash and seismic activity around...

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

This papers offers a theoretical explanation for the stylized fact that forecast combinations with estimated optimal weights often perform poorly in applications. The properties of the forecast combination are typically derived under the assumption that the weights are fixed, while in practice...

This paper examines which macroeconomic and financial variables are most informative for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from a forecasting perspective. The analysis is conducted for the FOMC decision during the period January 1990 - June...

Patton and Timmermann (2012, 'Forecast Rationality Tests Based on Multi-Horizon Bounds', <I>Journal of Business & Economic Statistics</I>, 30(1) 1-17) propose a set of useful tests for forecast rationality or optimality under squared error loss, including an easily implemented test based on a...</i>