Measuring bias is important as it helps identify flaws in quantitative forecasting methods or judgmental forecasts. It can, therefore, potentially help improve forecasts. Despite this, bias tends to be under represented in the literature: many studies focus solely on measuring accuracy. Methods...

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

Policymakers, firms, and investors closely monitor traditional survey-based consumer confidence indicators and treat it as an important piece of economic information. We propose a latent factor model for the vector of monthly survey-based consumer confidence and daily sentiment embedded in...

In this paper we develop a general framework to analyze state space models with timevarying system matrices where time variation is driven by the score of the conditional likelihood. We derive a new filter that allows for the simultaneous estimation of the state vector and of the time-varying...

To simultaneously consider mixed-frequency time series, their joint dynamics, and possible structural changes, we introduce a time-varying parameter mixed-frequency VAR. To keep our approach from becoming too complex, we implement time variation parsimoniously: only the intercepts and a common...

Implications for signal extraction from specifying unobserved components (UC) models with correlated or orthogonal innovations have been well investigated. In contrast, the forecasting implications of specifying UC models with different state correlation structures are less well understood. This...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of age-cohort survival curves under the assumption that the instantaneous mortality intensity is driven by an affine jump-diffusion (AJD) process. Advantages of an AJD specification of mortality dynamics include the availability of closed-form...

The paper compares one-period ahead forecasting performance of linear vector-autoregressive (VAR) models and single-equation Markov-switching (MS) models for two cases: when leading information is available and when it is not. The results show that single-equation MS models tend to perform...