By using a unique data set of single-family house transactions, we examine theaccuracy of the cost and sales comparison approach over different forecast horizons. We find that sales comparison values provide better long-term forecaststhan cost values if the economic loss function is symmetric. A...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...

Over recent years, study on risk management has been prompted by the Basel committee for regular banking supervisory. There are however limitations of some widely-used risk management methods that either calculate risk measures under the Gaussian distributional assumption or involve numerical...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

We consider an economy in which the oil costs, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to fundamental domestic and external demand and supply shocks. We estimate the effects of these structural shocks on US monthly data for the 1973.1-2007.12 period using...

This paper evaluates the characteristics of a Point in Time (PiT) rating approach for the estimation of firms' credit risk in terms of procyclicality. To this end I first estimate a logit model for the probability default (PD) of a set of Italian non-financial firms during the period 2006-2012,...

In this paper we introduce a non-parametric estimation method for a large Vector Autoregression (VAR) with time-varying parameters. The estimators and their asymptotic distributions are available in closed form. This makes the method computationally efficient and capable of handling information...

The question of how climate change and weather fluctuations affect the economy is high on the economic research agenda, but the quantification of the effects of temperatures at infra-annual frequencies still remains an open issue. Using daily county-level data since 1970, I construct quarterly...