Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

This paper proposes a measure of real-time inflation expectations based on metadata, i.e., data about data, constructed from internet search queries performed on the search engine Google. The forecasting performance of the Google Inflation Search Index (GISI) is assessed relative to 37 other...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This chapter surveys recent econometric methodologies for inference in large dimensional conditional factor models in finance. Changes in the business cycle and asset characteristics induce time variation in factor loadings and risk premia to be accounted for. The growing trend in the use of...

The purpose of this research is to determine whether bankruptcy forecasting models are subject to industry and time specific effects. A sample of 15,848 firms was obtained from the Compustat and CRSP databases, spanning the time period 1950 to 2013, of which 396 were bankrupt. Using five models...

The introduction by regulators of mandatory margining for bilateral OTCs is going to have a major impact on the derivatives market, particularly in light of the additional funding costs and liquidity requirements that large financial institutions will face. Fabrizio Anfuso, Daniel Aziz, Paul...

We investigate price duration variance estimators that have long been neglected in the literature. We show i) how price duration estimators can be used for the estimation and forecasting of the integrated variance of an underlying semi-martingale price process and ii) how they are affected by a)...

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...

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...

We develop a penalized two-pass regression with time-varying factor loadings. The penalization in the first pass enforces sparsity for the time-variation drivers while also maintaining compatibility with the no arbitrage restrictions by regularizing appropriate groups of coefficients. The second...