Heterosedasticity in returns may be explainable by trading volume. We use different volume variables, including surprise volume - i.e. unexpected above-avergae trading activity - which is derived from uncorrelated volume innovations. Assuming eakly exogenous volume, we extend the Lamoureux and...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...

This paper investigates if the impact of uncertainty shocks on the US economy has changed over time. To this end, we develop an extended Factor Augmented VAR model that simultaneously allows the estimation of a measure of uncertainty and its time-varying impact on a range of variables. We find...

Financial markets are central to the transmission of uncertainty shocks. This paper documents a new aspect of the interaction between the two by showing that uncertainty shocks have radically different macroeconomic implications depending on the state financial markets are in when they occur....

We use a factor model with stochastic volatility to decompose the time-varying variance of Macro economic and Financial variables into contributions from country-specific uncertainty and uncertainty common to all countries. We find that the common component plays an important role in driving the...

This paper introduces bootstrap specification tests for diffusion processes. In the one-dimensional case, the proposed test is closest to the non parametric test introduced by Ait-Sahalia (1996), in the sense that both procedures determine whether the drift and variance components of a...

This paper makes two contributions. First, we outline a simple simulation based framework for constructing conditional distributions for multi-factor and multi-dimensional diffusion processes, for the case where the functional form of the conditional density is unknown. The distributions can be...

We propose a new algorithm which allows easy estimation of Vector Autoregressions (VARs) featuring asymmetric priors and time varying volatilities, even when the cross sectional dimension of the system N is particularly large. The algorithm is based on a simple triangularisation which allows to...