Using well-known GARCH models for density prediction of daily S&P 500 and Nikkei 225 index returns, a comparison is provided between frequentist and Bayesian estimation. No significant difference is found between the qualities of the forecasts of the whole density, whereas the Bayesian approach...

This paper considers a sparsity approach for inference in large vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The approach is based on a Bayesian procedure and a graphical representation of VAR models. We discuss a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sparse graph selection, parameter estimation, and...

During the recent European sovereign debt crisis, returns on EMU government bond portfoli-os experienced substantial volatility clustering, leptokurtosis and skewed returns as well as correlation spikes. Asset managers invested in European government bonds had to derive new hedging strategies to...

This paper proposes a variational Bayes algorithm for computationally efficient posterior and predictive inference in time-varying parameter (TVP) models. Within this context we specify a new dynamic variable/model selection strategy for TVP dynamic regression models in the presence of a large...

Current understanding holds that financial contagion is driven mainly by system-wide interconnectedness of institutions. A distinction has been made between systematic and idiosyncratic channels of contagion, with shocks transmitted through the latter expected to be substantially more likely to...

Quantitative investment strategies are often selected from a broad class of candidate models estimated and tested on historical data. Standard statistical technique to prevent model overfitting such as out-sample back-testing turns out to be unreliable in the situation when selection is based on...

Time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility are routinely used for structural analysis and forecasting in settings involving a few macroeconomic variables. Applying these models to high-dimensional datasets has proved to be challenging due to intensive computations and...

We develop methods for Bayesian model averaging (BMA) or selection (BMS) in Panel Vector Autoregressions (PVARs). Our approach allows us to select between or average over all possible combinations of restricted PVARs where the restrictions involve interdependencies between and heterogeneities...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. In particular, a popular metric for comparing stochastic volatility models is the DIC based on the conditional likelihood — obtained by conditioning on the latent variables. However, some recent...

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...