Statistical Foundations for Econometric Techniques by Asad Zaman. Pp. xxviS570. London: Academic Press, 1996. ($US 44.95 paper) Web Information: www.apnet.com/textbook/sbe/new9596/zaman.htm.

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this article, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes....

The t-test of an individual coefficient is used widely in models of qualitative choice. However, it is well known that the t-test can yield misleading results when the sample size is small. This paper provides some experimental evidence on the finite sample properties of the t-test in models...

This article reviews the exciting and rapidly expanding literature on realized volatility. After presenting a general univariate framework for estimating realized volatilities, a simple discrete time model is presented in order to motivate the main results. A continuous time specification...

Various univariate and multivariate models of volatility have been used to evaluate market risk, asymmetric shocks, thresholds, leverage effects, and Value-at-Risk in economics and finance. This article is concerned with market risk, and develops a constant conditional correlation vector...

As U.S. Treasury securities carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, they are free of default risk. Thus, their yields are risk-free rates of return, which allows the most recently issued U.S. Treasury securities to be used as a benchmark to price other fixed-income instruments....

The challenge of modeling, estimating, testing, and forecasting financial volatility is both intellectually worthwhile and also central to the successful analysis of financial returns and optimal investment strategies. In each of the three primary areas of volatility modeling, namely,...

The stochastic volatility model usually incorporates asymmetric effects by introducing the negative correlation between the innovations in returns and volatility. In this paper, we propose a new asymmetric stochastic volatility model, based on the leverage and size effects. The model is a...

In the class of stochastic volatility (SV) models, leverage effects are typically specified through the direct correlation between the innovations in both returns and volatility, resulting in the dynamic leverage (DL) model. Recently, two asymmetric SV models based on threshold effects have been...