This paper constructs risk-free interest rates implicit in index option prices for ten of the major G11 currencies. We compare these rates to the yields of government bonds to provide international estimates of the convenience yield earned by safe assets. Average convenience yields across...

We find out-of-sample predictability of commodity futures excess returns using forecast combinations of 28 potential predictors. Such gains in forecast accuracy translate into economically significant improvements in certainty equivalent returns and Sharpe ratios for a mean-variance investor....

This paper examines the relation between variations in perceived inflation uncertainty and bond premia. Using the subjective probability distributions available in the Survey of Professional Forecasters we construct a quarterly time series of average individual uncertainty about inflation...

With the aim of constructing predictive distributions for daily returns, we introduce a new Markov normal mixture model in which the components are themselves normal mixtures. We derive the restrictions on the autocovariances and linear representation of integer powers of the time series in...

We perform a comprehensive examination of the recursive, comparative predictive performance of a number of linear and non-linear models for UK stock and bond returns. We estimate Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STR) regime switching models,...

We explore whether economic links via trade affect aggregate Chinese stock market returns. We find that market return indices from countries that China net exports from can forecast the Chinese aggregate market return at the weekly time horizon. Countries that China net exports to have no...

We propose a comprehensive empirical examination of the time-varying leading properties of two high yield spreads in the United States and compare them with the leading properties of the term spread between the mid-1980s and the end of 2011. We show that high yield spreads are not reliable...

This paper documents that option-implied tail risk in the U.S. financial sector predicts real economic activity. The predictability is found to be incremental to the information content in a stock price-based measure of financial sector tail risk. This finding holds both in- and out-of-sample...