Interest in prediction markets has increased in the last decade, driven in part by the hope that these markets will prove to be valuable tools in forecasting, decision-making and risk management -- in both the public and private sectors. This paper outlines five open questions in the literature,...

Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results for yield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similar modeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadays as hedging instruments for options on realized variance. We consider the...

This study reconsiders the role of jumps for volatility forecasting by showing that jumps have a positive and mostly significant impact on future volatility. This result becomes apparent once volatility is separated into its continuous and discontinuous component using estimators which are not...

A rapidly growing literature has documented important improvements in volatility measurement and forecasting performance through the use of realized volatilities constructed from high-frequency returns coupled with relatively simple reduced-form time series modeling procedures. Building on...

For the Euro 2000 Soccer Championships an experimental asset market was condueted, with traders buying and selling contracts on the winners of individual matches. Market-generated probabilities are compared to professional bet quotas, and factors that are responsible for the quality of the...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

Value-at-risk (VaR) is a useful risk measure broadly used by financial institutions all over the world. VaR has been extensively used to measure systematic risk exposure in developed markets like of the US, Europe and Asia. This paper analyzes the accuracy of VaR measure for Pakistan's emerging...

An OLS and probit framework is used to examine the predictive power of yield spreads with respect to GDP growth and recessions in the Eurozone from the 1990s to the recent past. Credit default swap (CDS) data on sovereign bonds, which provide a direct measure of default risk, are employed as...