This paper is about contagion and interdependence among Central European economies. It investigates the extent to which country-specific shocks spread across these countries beyond the normal channels of interdependence, taking into account common external shocks. To model such shocks, we make...

This paper analyses mutual causalities between crude oil price and euro / US dollar exchange rate. Instead of focusing on long-run macroeconomic linkages like the bulk of therelevant literature, the present approach takes a financial markets perspective using daily data. The fast-running...

This paper demonstrates effects of economic convergence processes on the foreign exchange behaviour in a monetary modelling approach. Since the exchange rate represents the relative price of two currencies, commonness of stochastic trends between the fundamental determinants of supply and demand...

This paper investigates the capital market relations between Euroland and the USA from 1990 until 2006. Formally based on the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), backward recursive estimations establish a long-run equilibrium between European and US government bond yields. Since the mid-1990s...

This paper studies asset allocation decisions in the presence of regime switching in asset returns. Wefind evidence that four separate regimes - characterized as crash, slow growth, bull and recovery states- are required to capture the joint distribution of stock and bond returns. Optimal asset...

The estimation of multivariate GARCH models remains a challenging task, even in modern computer environments. This manuscript shows how Independent Component Analysiscan be used to estimate the Generalized Orthogonal GARCH model in a fraction of the time otherwise required. The proposed method...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariancematrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). Itis shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systemsby means of a two-step strategy. The finite sample...

We analyze if and to what extent fundamental macroeconomic factors, temporary influencesor more structural factors have contributed to the low levels of US bond yields over the lastfew years. For that purpose, we start with a general model of interest rate determination. Theempirical part...

Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number ofapproaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic vari-ables and aims, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms...