This thesis consists of five self-contained papers, which are all related to the financial markets in the three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Paper [I] studies the impact of news from the Moscow and New York stock exchanges on the returns and volatilities of the Baltic States'...

This thesis comprises four papers concerning risk prediction. Paper [I] suggests a nonlinear and multivariate time series model framework that enables the study of simultaneity in returns and in volatilities, as well as asymmetric effects arising from shocks. Using daily data 2000-2006 for the...

Lagrange multiplier (LM) test statistics are derived for testing a linear moving average model against an asymmetric moving average model and an LM type test against an additive smooth transition moving average model. The latter model is introduced in the paper. The small sample performance of...

In general, the properties of the conditional distribution of multiple period returns do not follow easily from the one-period data generating process. This renders computation of Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall for multiple period returns a non-trivial task. In this paper we consider some...