In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

An efficient and accurate approach is proposed for forecasting Value at Risk [VaR] and Expected Shortfall [ES] measures in a Bayesian framework. This consists of a new adaptive importance sampling method for Quantile Estimation via Rapid Mixture of t approximations [QERMit]. As a first step the...

This paper concerns estimating parameters in a high-dimensional dynamic factormodel by the method of maximum likelihood. To accommodate missing data in theanalysis, we propose a new model representation for the dynamic factor model. Itallows the Kalman filter and related smoothing methods to...

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Computational Statistics & Data Analysis' 56(11), pp. 3398-1414.Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior...

We determine the magnitude and nature of systematic default risk using 1971{2009) default data from Moody's. We disentangle systematic risk factors due to business cycle effects, common default dynamics (frailty), and industry-specific dynamics (including contagion). To quantify the contribution...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

Many seasonal macroeconomic time series are subject to changes in their means and variances over a long time horizon. In this paper we propose a general treatment for the modelling of time-varying features in economic time series. We show that time series models with mean and variance functions...

The basic structural time series model has been designed for the modelling and forecasting of seasonal economic time series. In this paper we explore a generalisation of the basic structural time series model in which the time-varying trigonometric terms associated with different seasonal...

We propose a new class of observation-driven time-varying parameter models for dynamic volatilities and correlations to handle time series from heavy-tailed distributions. The model adopts generalized autoregressive score dynamics to obtain a time-varying covariance matrix of the multivariate...