Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

We extend the work done in our “Redux” paper from Oct 2011 to find a weighted composite U.S coincident economic index (CEI) that includes non-zero weightings from all 50 states and when used in a standard Probit model, produces a perfect correlation (R2 of 1) to NBER recession dating. We...

This paper revisits the performance of frequently used risk forecasting methods, such as the Value-at-Risk models. The aim is to analyze its performance, and mitigate its pitfalls by incorporating conditional variance estimates, as generated by a GARCH model. Notably, this paper tests several...

The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary...

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary...

The paper attempts to provide an appropriate model specification for identifying technology and other macroeconomic shocks in a structural VAR framework. The investigation is conducted based on two seminal structural VAR studies by Gali (1999) and King et al. (1991). The models of these studies...

We introduce a multivariate multiplicative error model which is driven by componentspecific observation driven dynamics as well as a common latent autoregressive factor. The model is designed to explicitly account for (information driven) common factor dynamics as well as idiosyncratic effects...