It has long been known that the estimated persistence parameter in the GARCH(1,1) - model is biased upwards when the parameters of the model are not constant throughout the sample. The present paper explains the mechanics of this behavior for a particular class of estimates of the model...

We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market...

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...

The paper explores the relationship between various orderings among probability forecasts that have been suggested in the literature. It is shown that well calibrated forecasters are in general not comparable according to the domination ordering suggested by Vardeman and Meeden (1983), that the...

The paper considers the Markov-Switching GARCH(1,1)-model with time-varying transition probabilities. It derives su±cient conditions for the square of the process to display long memory and provides some additional intuition for the empirical observation that estimated GARCH-parameters often...

We investigate the OLS-based estimator s2 of the disturbance variance in the standard linear regression model with cross section data when the disturbances are homoskedastic, but spatially correlated. For the most popular model of spatially autoregressive disturbances, we show that s2 can be...