Using unobservable conditional variance as measure, latentvariable approaches, such as GARCH and stochasticvolatility models, have traditionally been dominating the empirical finance literature. In recent years, with the availability of highfrequency financial market data modeling realized...

There are over 3 billion searches globally on Google every day. This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future unemployment rate in Finland. Predicting the present and the near future is of interest, as the official records of the state...

The aim of this paper seeks to analyse how the energy price's cojuntural behaviour and structural conditions affect the short-run and mid-run overview of the energy integration process in South America (SA). For these porpoise we - first describe the world-wide energy agenda and the effect of...

The aim of this paper seeks to analyse how the energy price’s cojuntural behaviour and structural conditions affect the short-run and mid-run overview of the energy integration process in South America (SA). <p> For these porpoise we - first describe the world-wide energy agenda and the effect of...</p>

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...

We evaluate conditional predictive densities for U.S. output growth and inflation using a number of commonly used forecasting models that rely on a large number of macroeconomic predictors. More specifically, we evaluate how well conditional predictive densities based on the commonly used...

We propose new methods for evaluating predictive densities. The methods include Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises-type tests for the correct specification of predictive densities robust to dynamic mis-specification. The novelty is that the tests can detect mis-specification in the...

This study tests the random walk hypothesis in the spot prices of the petroleum products markets. Under the variance ratio test, a less restrictive random walk process namely the martingale process is examined over the period 1998-2008. The variance ratio methodology is capable of providing...

This paper examines trends in annual temperature data for the northern and southern hemisphere (1850-2010) by using variants of the shifting-mean autoregressive (SM-AR) model of González and Teräsvirta (2008). Univariate models are first fitted to each series by using the so called QuickShift...

We propose a flexible model to describe nonlinearities and long-range dependence in time series dynamics. Our model is an extension of the heterogeneous autoregressive model. Structural breaks occur through mixture distributions in state innovations of linear Gaussian state space models. Monte...