We analyze the distribution of economic activity across space for different types of activity and different levels of aggregation. Not only is this distribution highly uneven (independently of the type of activity and level of aggregation), it is also remarkably regular regarding its size...

We examine the impact of temporal and portfolio aggregation on the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts over a horizon of ten trading days for a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. The VaR forecasts are constructed based on daily, weekly or biweekly...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

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 propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...

We introduce a statistical test for comparing the predictive accuracy of competing copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts, based on the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC). The test is valid under general conditions: in particular it allows for parameter estimation...

We analyze the dynamics of Chinese comparative advantage as measured by export shares and the Balassa index using 3-digit and 4-digit sectors for the period 1970 – 1997. We use novel tools to identify periods of rapid structural change and the persistence of comparative advantage, such as...

The sum of squared intraday returns provides an unbiased and almost error-free measure of ex-post volatility. In this paper we develop a nonlinear Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) model for realized volatility, which accommodates level shifts, day-of-the-week...