Several Bayesian model combination schemes, including some novel approaches that simultaneously allow for parameter uncertainty, model uncertainty and robust time varying model weights, are compared in terms of forecast accuracy and economic gains using financial and macroeconomic time series....

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

Empirical measures of world consumption growth risk have failed to rationalize the cross-section of country equity returns. We propose a new factor, termed "the global consumption factor", to explain the patterns in risk premiums on international equity markets. We identify this factor as the...

This paper explores the interaction between retirement flexibility and portfolio choice in an overlapping-generations model of a closed economy. Retirement flexibility is often seen as a hedge against capital market risks which justifies more risky asset portfolios. We show, however, that this...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of risk across generations whose savings mix is subject to illiquidity in the form of uncertain trading costs. We use a stylised two-period OLG framework, where each generation makes a portfolio allocation decision for retirement, and show that...

We explore how members of a collective pension scheme can share inflation risks in the absence of suitable financial market instruments. Using intergenerational risk sharing arrangements, risks can be allocated better across the various participants of a collective pension scheme than would be...

This paper proposes an up-to-date review of estimation strategies available for the Bayesian inference of GARCH-type models. The emphasis is put on a novel efficient procedure named AdMitIS. The methodology automatically constructs a mixture of Student-t distributions as an approximation to the...

Accurate prediction of risk measures such as Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) requires precise estimation of the tail of the predictive distribution. Two novel concepts are introduced that offer a specific focus on this part of the predictive density: the censored posterior, a...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

Regression analyses of cross-country economic growth data are complicated by two main forms of model uncertainty: the uncertainty in selecting explanatory variables and the uncertainty in specifying the functional form of the regression function. Most discussions in the literature address these...