The unemployment rate in Australia is modelled as an assymmetric and non-linear function of aggregate demand, productivity, real wages and unemployment benefits. Negative changes in aggregate demand cause the unemployment rate to rise rapidly, while real wage rigidity contributes its to slow...

I comment on the controversy between McCloskey & Ziliak and Hoover & Siegler on statistical versus economic significance, in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology. I argue that while McCloskey & Ziliak are right in emphasizing ’real error’, i.e. non-sampling error that...

The use of large-dimensional factor models in forecasting has received much attention in the literature with the consensus being that improvements on forecasts can be achieved when comparing with standard models. However, recent contributions in the literature have demonstrated that care needs...

Macroeconomic forecasting using factor models estimated by principal components has become a popular research topic with many both theoretical and applied contributions in the literature. In this paper we attempt to address an often neglected issue in these models: The problem of outliers in the...

A stylized fact is that realized variance has long memory. We show that, when the instantaneous volatility is driven by a fractional Brownian motion, the integrated variance is characterized by long-range dependence. As a consequence, the realized variance inherits this property when prices are...

The finite sample properties of the state space methods applied to long memory time series are analyzed through Monte Carlo simulations. The state space setup allows to introduce a novel modeling approach in the long memory framework, which directly tackles measurement errors and random level...

In this paper, we demonstrate that jumps in financial asset prices are not nearly as common as generally thought, and that they account for only a very small proportion of total return variation. We base our investigation on an extensive set of ultra high-frequency equity and foreign exchange...

In this paper, we present a realised range-based multipower variation theory, which can be used to estimate return variation and draw jump-robust inference about the diffusive volatility component, when a high-frequency record of asset prices is available. The standard range-statistic –...

This paper studies the impact of jumps on volatility estimation and inference based on various realised variation measures such as realised variance, realised multipower variation and truncated realised multipower variation. We review the asymptotic theory of those realised variation measures...