This paper describes a forecasting exercise of close-to-open returns on major global stock indices, based on price patterns from foreign markets that have become available overnight. As the close-to-open gap is a scalar response variable to a functional variable, it is natural to focus on...

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an...

We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...

Exchange rates typically exhibit time-varying patterns in both means andvariances. The histograms of such series indicate heavy tails. In thispaper we construct models which enable a decision-maker to analyze theimplications of such time series patterns for currency risk management.Our approach...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...

The ratio of consumption to total household wealth (i.e., tangible assets plus unobserved human wealth) is commonly calculated from the estimation of a log-linear version of the household intertemporal budget constraint as a cointegrating relationship between consumption, assets and earnings...

We construct models which enable a decision-maker to analyze the implications oftypical timeseries patterns of daily exchange rates for currency risk management. Ourapproach is Bayesianwhere extensive use is made of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The effects ofseveral modelcharacteristics...