We investigate the predictive ability of financial and macroeconomic variables for German stock and bond returns using a battery of performance metrics in addition to measures of superior predictive accuracy to identify the ‘best' models. We also examine whether combination forecasts provide...

We demonstrate that the parameters controlling skewness and kurtosis in popular equity return models estimated at daily frequency can be obtained almost as precisely as if volatility is observable by simply incorporating the strong information content of realized volatility measures extracted...

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....

I generalize the long-run risks (LRR) model of Bansal and Yaron (2004) by incorporating recursive smooth ambiguity aversion preferences from Klibanoff et al. (2005, 2009) and time-varying ambiguity. Relative to the Bansal-Yaron model, the generalized LRR model is as tractable but more flexible...

We document a substantial increase in downside risk to US economic growth over the last 30 years. By modelling secular trends and cyclical changes of the predictive density of GDP growth, we find an accelerating decline in the skewness of the conditional distributions, with significant,...

Predictions of asset returns and volatilities are heavily discussed and analyzed in the finance research literature. In this paper, we compare linear and nonlinear predictions for stock- and bond index returns and their covariance matrix. We show in-sample and out-of-sample prediction accuracy...

We propose an economically motivated forecast combination strategy in which model weights are related to portfolio returns obtained by a given forecast model. An empirical application based on an optimal mean-variance bond portfolio problem is used to highlight the advantages of the proposed...

Many financial decisions such as portfolio allocation, risk management, option pricing and hedge strategies are based on forecasts of the conditional variances, covariances and correlations of financial returns. The paper shows an empirical comparison of several methods to predict one-step-ahead...