Despite its important role in monetary policy and finance, the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates has received virtually no empirical support. The empirical failure of the EH was attributed to a variety of econometric biases associated with the single-equation...

Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits non-zero intemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for...

The 2007-2008 financial crises has made it painfully obvious that markets may quickly turn illiquid. Moreover, recent experience has shown that distress and lack of active trading can jump around between seemingly unconnected parts of the financial system contributing to transforming isolated...

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...

Most papers in the portfolio choice literature have examined linear predictability frameworks based on the idea that simple but flexible Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models can be expanded to produce portfolio allocations that hedge against the bull and bear dynamics typical of financial markets...

We investigate the lead-lag relationships between issuer- and investor-paid credit rating agencies, in the aftermath of the regulatory reforms undertaken in the U.S. between 2002 and 2006 - including watch list inclusions and outlooks. First, we find that the lead effect of investor-paid over...

We investigate whether the favorable performance of a fairly simple multistate multivariate Markov regime switching model relative to even very complex multivariate GARCH specifications, recently reported in the literature using measures of in-sample prediction accuracy, extends to pseudo...

This paper analyzes the empirical performance of two alternative ways in which multi-factor models with time-varying risk exposures and premia may be estimated. The first method echoes the seminal two-pass approach advocated by Fama and MacBeth (1973). The second approach is based on a Bayesian...

We perform a comprehensive examination of the recursive, comparative predictive performance of a number of linear and non-linear models for UK stock and bond returns. We estimate Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STR) regime switching models,...

Regime switching models have been assuming a central role in financial applications because of their well-known ability to capture the presence of rich non-linear patterns in the joint distribution of asset returns. This paper examines how the presence of regimes in means, variances, and...