Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

Alternative strategies for predicting stock market volatility are examined. In out-of-sample forecasting experiments implied-volatility information, derived from contemporaneously observed option prices or history-based volatility predictors, such as GARCH models, are investigated, to determine...

This paper describes a forecasting exercise of close-to-open returns on major global stock indices, based on price patterns from foreign markets that have become available overnight. As the close-to-open gap is a scalar response variable to a functional variable, it is natural to focus on...

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...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariance matrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). It is shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systems by means of a two-step strategy. The finite...

This paper characterizes the asymptotic behaviour, as the number of assets gets arbitrarily large, of the portfolio weights for the class of tangency portfolios belonging to the Markowitz paradigm. It is assumed that the joint distribution of asset returns is characterized by a general factor...

We examine the impact of temporal and portfolio aggregation on the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts over a horizon of ten trading days for a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. The VaR forecasts are constructed based on daily, weekly or biweekly...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....