Current practice largely follows restrictive approaches to market risk measurement, such as historical simulation or RiskMetrics. In contrast, we propose flexible methods that exploit recent developments in financial econometrics and are likely to produce more accurate risk assessments, treating...

I investigate the origins of the now-ubiquitous term ”Big Data," in industry and academics, in computer science and statistics/econometrics. Credit for coining the term must be shared. In particular, John Mashey and others at Silicon Graphics produced highly relevant (unpublished,...

The Diebold-Mariano (DM) test was intended for comparing forecasts; it has been, and remains, useful in that regard. The DM test was not intended for comparing models. Unfortunately, however, much of the large subsequent literature uses DM-type tests for comparing models, in (pseudo-)...

We propose and illustrate a Markov-switching multi-fractal duration (MSMD) model for analysis of inter-trade durations in financial markets. We establish several of its key properties with emphasis on high persistence (indeed long memory). Empirical exploration suggests MSMD's superiority...

We provide a new and superior measure of U.S. GDP, obtained by applying optimal signal-extraction techniques to the (noisy) expenditure-side and income-side estimates. Its properties - particularly as regards serial correlation - differ markedly from those of the standard expenditure-side...

I investigate Big Data, the phenomenon, the term, and the discipline, with emphasis on origins of the term, in industry and academics, in computer science and statistics/econometrics. Big Data the phenomenon continues unabated, Big Data the term is now firmly entrenched, and Big Data the...

Using a connectedness-measurement technology fundamentally grounded in modern network theory, we measure real output connectedness for a set of six developed countries, 1962-2010. We show that global connectedness is sizable and time-varying over the business cycle, and we study the nature of...

The downward trend in Arctic sea ice is a key factor determining the pace and intensity of future global climate change; moreover, declines in sea ice can have a wide range of additional environmental and economic consequences. Based on several decades of satellite data, we provide statistical...

Notwithstanding its impressive contributions to empirical financial economics, there remains a significant gap in the volatility literature, namely its relative neglect of the connection between macroeconomic fundamentals and asset return volatility. We progress by analyzing a broad...

The Svensson generalization of the popular Nelson-Siegel term structure model is widely used by practitioners and central banks. Unfortunately, like the original Nelson-Siegel specification, this generalization, in its dynamic form, does not enforce arbitrage-free consistency over time. Indeed,...