Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex-ante forecasting performance for...

Tests of causality in variance in multiple time series have been proposed recently, based on residuals of estimated univariate models. Although such tests are applied frequently little is known about their power properties. In this paper we show that a convenient alternative to residual based...

In panel data econometrics the Hausman test is of central importance to select an e?cient estimator of the models' slope parameters. When testing the null hypothesis of no correlation between unobserved heterogeneity and observable explanatory variables by means of the Hausman test model...