Industrial production is analysed for three countries. A GARCH framework is employed to model the conditional variances of the cycles, which are found to react asymmetrically to shocks of opposite sign; one of the three cases exhibits long-memory features. The ability of GARCH models at...

The paper investigates whether the impact of selected news - scheduled and un-scheduled - affects only the current conditional variance of financial prices or, by bringing new information to the market, induces also a revision of the implied variance, i.e. the variance expected to prevail over...

We show that price level stabilization is not optimal in an economy where agents have incomplete knowledge about the policy implemented and try to learn it. A systematically more accommodative policy than what agents expect generates short term gains without triggering an abrupt loss of...

Does capital markets uncertainty affect the business cycle? We find that financial volatility predicts 30% of post-war economic activity in the United States, and that during the Great Moderation, aggregate stock market volatility explains, alone, up to 55% of real growth. In out-of-sample...

This paper studies asset markets in which ambiguity averse investors face Knightian uncertainty about expected payoffs. The same investors, however, might wish to resolve their uncertainty, although not risk, by just purchasing information. In these markets, uninformed and, hence, ambiguity...

Which pricing kernel restrictions are needed to make low dimensional Markov models consistent with given sets of predictions on aggregate stock-market fluctuations ? This paper develops theoretical test conditions addressing this and related reverse engineering issues arising within a fairly...