Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

Nominal and real U.S. interest rates (1997–2007) are combined with inflationexpectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to calculate time series ofrisk premia. It is shown that survey data on inflation and output growth uncertainty,as well as a proxy for liquidity premia can...

The mid-term and long-term growth potential of China’s insurance industry is a subject ofsignificant interest to governments, business and academia. In this paper, the ‘‘worldinsurance growth curve’’ is used in conjunction with estimates of China’s future GDPgrowth to estimate the...

Explaining exchange rates has long been an important but vexing issue in international economics and finance. In recent years, a number of studies have shown that investors' private information plays a central role in determining exchange rates. We demonstrate in this paper that the private...

In recent years, support vector regression (SVR), a novel neural network (NN) technique, has been successfully used for financial forecasting. This paper deals with the application of SVR in volatility forecasting. Based on a recurrent SVR, a GARCH method is proposed and is compared with a...

According to housing investment models, house prices and replacement costshould have an equilibrating relationship. Previous empirical work|mainlybased on aggregate-level data|has found only little evidence of such a relationship.By using a unique data set, covering transactions of...

Empirical studies have shown that a large number of financial asset returns exhibit fat tails and are often characterized by volatility clustering and asymmetry. Also revealed as a stylized fact is Long memory or long range dependence in market volatility, with significant impact on pricing and...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strikeand time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IV S). Practicalapplications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamicsthrough a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

We propose a general class of Markov-switching-ARFIMA processes in order to combine strands of long memory and Markov-switching literature. Although the coverage of this class of models is broad, we show that these models can be easily estimated with the DLV algorithm proposed. This algorithm...

It is investigated whether Euro-area variables can be forecast better based on synthetic time series for the pre-Euro period or by using just data from Germany for the pre-Euro period. Our forecast comparison is based on quarterly data for the period 1970Q1 - 2003Q4 for ten macroeconomic...