We provide a new framework for modeling trends and periodic patterns in high-frequency financial data. Seeking adaptivity to ever-changing market conditions, we enlarge the Fourier flexible form into a richer functional class: both our smooth trend and the seasonality are non-parametrically...

The episodes of stock market crises in Europe and the U.S.A.since the year 2000,and the fragility of the international stock markets,have sparked the interest of researchers in understanding and in modeling the markets’ rising volatilities in order to prevent against crises.Portfolio managers...

This paper investigates the properties of Dickey-Fuller tests for seasonally unadjusted quarterly data when deterministic seasonality is present but it is neglected in the test regression. While for the random walk case the answer is straightforward, an extensive Monte Carlo study has to be...

The episodes of stock market crises in Europe and the U.S.A. since the year 2000,and the fragility of the New Technology sector after the explosion of the speculative bubble,have sparked the interest of researchers in understanding and in modeling this market’s high volatility to prevent...

We analyze five vintages of eighteen quarterly macroeconomic variables for the Netherlands and we focus on the degree of deterministic seasonality in these series. We document that the data show most such deterministic seasonality for their first release vintage and for the last available...

The structural vector autoregression (SVAR) has become a central tool for research in empirical macroeconomics. Because the vast majority of these models are exactly identified, researchers have traditionally relied upon the informal use of prior information to compare alternative...

We study the impact of the system dimension on commonly used model selection criteria (AIC,BIC, HQ) and LR based general to specific testing strategies for lag length estimation in VAR's. We show that AIC's well known overparameterization feature becomes quickly irrelevant as we move away from...

We propose a discussion index model (Stock and Watson, 2002) to fore- cast electricity demand for one hour to one week ahead. The model is particularly useful as it captures complicated seasonal patterns in the data. The forecast performance of the proposed method is illustrated with a simulated...

In this paper we propose a Bayesian analysis of seasonal unit roots in quarterly observed time series. Seasonal unit root processes are useful to describe economic series with changing seasonal fluctuations. A natural alternative model for similar purposes contains deterministic seasonal mean...

This paper provides simple approximations for evaluating option prices and implied volatilities under stochastic volatility. Simple recursive formulae are derived that can easily be implemented in spreadsheets. The traditional random walk assumption, dominating in the analysis of financial...