This paper examines the long-run trends in per-capita income across the US states (1929-2005). Our analysis advocates and implements a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), in order to investigate whether disparities in per-capita income embody a stable long-run relation. The empirical...

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

We present new results for the likelihood-based analysis of the dynamic factor model that possibly includes intercepts and explanatory variables. The latent factors are modelled by stochastic processes. The idiosyncratic disturbances are specified as autoregressive processes with mutually...

Using a limiting approach to portfolio credit risk, we obtain analyticexpressions for the tail behavior of the distribution of credit losses. We showthat in many cases of practical interest the distribution of these losses haspolynomial ('fat') rather than exponential ('thin') tails. Our...

Dynamic models for credit rating transitions are important ingredients for dynamic credit risk analyses. We compare the properties of two such models that have recently been put forward. The models mainly differ in their treatment of systematic risk, which can be modeled either using discrete...

The multivariate analysis of a panel of economic and financial time series with mixed frequencies is a challenging problem. The standard solution is to analyze the mix of monthly and quarterly time series jointly by means of a multivariate dynamic model with a monthly time index: artificial...