Population forecasts are crucial for many social, political and economic decisions. Officialpopulation projections rely in general on deterministic models which use different scenariosfor future vital rates to indicate uncertainty. However, this technique shows substantialweak points such as...

This paper presents a new approach to deriving default intensities from CDS or bond spreadsthat yields smooth intensity curves required e.g. for pricing or risk management purposes. Assumingcontinuous premium or coupon payments, the default intensity can be obtained by solving an...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochasticvolatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding MarkovChain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on approachwhich is easily implemented in empirical...

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persis-tence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. thepolicy spreads) remains suffciently low. This paper applies fractionalintegration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads ofeuro area money...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations betweenfinancial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors behavior from a...

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persistence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. the policy spreads) remains sufficiently low. This paper applies fractional integration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads of euro area...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

This paper applies a non- and a semiparametric copula-based approach to analyze the first-order autocorrelation of returns in high frequency financial time series. Using the EUREX D3047 tick data from the German stock index, it can be shown that the temporal dependence structure of price...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...