The Social Security systems of the G7 countries were established in an era when populations were young and the number of contributors far outweighed the number of beneficiaries. Now, for each beneficiary there are fewer contributors, and this downward trend is projected to accelerate. To...

In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the U.S. Treasury Department forecasts of real growth and inflation from 1976 to 1990 for the Group of Seven (G-7) economies. The accuracy of these forecasts is measured against the standard of actual real world growth and inflation as subsequently...

We systematically examine the comparative predictive performance of a number of alternative linear and non-linear models for stock and bond returns in the G7 countries. Besides Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) regime switching...

We analyze and assess the impact of macroeconomic announcements on the discontinuities in many assets: stock index futures, bond futures, exchange rates, and gold. We use bi-power variation and the recently proposed non-parametric techniques of Lee and Mykland (2006) to extract jumps. Beyond...

Changes in costs faced by firms have direct implications for their price-cost margins. Knowing how prices respond to such cost changes is crucial for understanding how individual markets function and, in turn, for understanding the macroeconomy. We analyze exchange rate pass-through into U.S....

This paper introduces a compound GARCH/markov switching model to add flexibility to the GARCH model in order to model the volatilities of exchange rates in target zones subject to realignments. The compound volatility model endogenizes the weights given to realignments (and all other shocks) in...

In this paper, we estimate (by maximum likelihood) the parameters of univariate fractionally integrated real exchange rate time series models, and test for autoregressive unit roots on the alternative of a covariance stationary long-memory process. We use quarterly dollar-based real exchange...

Research has consistently found that implied volatility is a conditionally biased predictor of realized volatility across asset markets. This paper evaluates explanations for this bias in the market for options on foreign exchange futures. No solution considered—including a model of priced...

We explore the relationship between disaggregated order flow, the Canada/U.S. dollar (CAD/USD) market and U.S. macroeconomic announcements. Three types of CAD order flow and the CAD/USD are cointegrated. Financial order flow appears to contemporaneously drive the CAD/USD while commercial order...

I analyze the role of real and monetary shocks on the exchange rate behavior using a structural vector autoregressive model of the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world. The shocks are identified using sign restrictions on the responses of the variables to orthogonal disturbances. These...