This paper examines the extent to which tax and benefit policy changes introduced in the period 2001-11 had a poverty- or inequality-reducing effect. We assess whether the period was indeed a “missed opportunity” for policy changes to make a difference to poverty reduction since the Lisbon...

The hedging of weather risks has become extremely relevant in recent years, promoting the diffusion of weather derivative contracts. The pricing of such contracts require the development of appropriate models for the prediction of the underlying weather variables. Within this framework, we...

The modelling of wind speed is a traditional topic in meteorological research, where the main interest is on the short-term forecast of wind speed intensity and direction. More recently, this theme has received some interest in the quantitative finance literature for its relationship with...

Contrary to the common wisdom that asset prices are barely possible to forecast, we show that high and low prices of equity shares are largely predictable. We propose to model them using a simple implementation of a fractional vector autoregressive model with error correction (FVECM). This model...

In the last 15 years, several Multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) models have appeared in the literature. Some recent research has begun to examine MGARCH specifications in terms of their out-of-sample forecasting performance. In this paper, we provide an empirical comparison of a set of models, namely...

Weather derivatives have become very popular tools in weather risk management in recent years. One of the elements supporting their diffusion has been the increase in volatility observed on many energy markets. Among the several available contracts, Quanto options are now becoming very popular...

In this paper, we estimate, model and forecast Realized Range Volatility, a new realized measure and estimator of the quadratic variation of financial prices. This estimator was early introduced in the literature and it is based on the high-low range observed at high frequency during the day. We...

It is well-known that the estimated GARCH dynamics exhibit common patterns. Starting from this fact we extend the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model by allowing for a cluster- ing structure of the univariate GARCH parameters. The model can be estimated in two steps, the first devoted to...