This paper deals with stress tests for credit risk and shows how exploiting the discretion when setting up and implementing a model can drive the results of a quantitative stress test for default probabilities. For this purpose, we employ several variations of a CreditPortfolioView-style model...

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) changes the relative economic riskiness and risk-adjusted-performance of different asset markets. While the empirical distribution for stock return shifted to the right and became more concentrated around the mean after the GFC, the real estate market...

Growth regression economics are haunted by the fact that results are easily overthrown by regressing alternative model specifications. Recent research therefore aims at obtaining robust regression results by systematically running multiple models and picking surviving variables. This note shows...

Banks' holding of reasonable capital buffers in excess of minimum requirements could alleviate the procyclicality problem potentially exacerbated by the rating-sensitive capital charges of Basel II. Determining the required buffer size is an important risk management issue for banks, which the...

Paralleling regulatory developments, we devise value-at-risk and expected shortfall type risk measures for the potential losses arising from using misspecied models when pricing and hedging contingent claims. Essentially, losses from model risk correspond to losses realized on a perfectly hedged...

The purpose of this study is to assess model risk with respect to parameter estimation for a simple binary logistic regression model applied as a predictive model. The assessment is done by comparing the effectiveness of eleven different parameter estimation methods. The results from the...

Under the Basel II regulatory framework non-negligible statistical problems arise when backtesting risk measures. In this setting backtests often become infeasible due to a low number of violations leading to heavy size distortions. According to Escanciano and Olmo (2010, 2011) these problems...

This paper identifies and measures fiscal spillovers in the EU countries empirically using a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model. Our aim is to look at the sign and the absolute values of fiscal spillovers in a country-wise perspective and at the time profile (impulse response) of the...

Good policy requires reliable scientific knowledge, but there are many obstacles. Most econometric estimates lack adequate statistical power; some estimates cannot be replicated; publication selection bias (the selective reporting of results) is common; and there is wide variation in the evidence...

The paper is a keynote lecture from the Tilburg-Madrid Conference on Hypothesis Tests: Foundations and Applications at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Madrid, Spain, 15-16 December 2011. It addresses the role of tests of statistical hypotheses (specification tests) in...