Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

We propose a novel way to assess information processing in a complex environment of market fragmentation. We take a different angle from the price discovery literature, and investigate information processing in the stochastic process driving stock's volatility (volatility discovery). We show...

The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

This paper details efforts at developing and estimating a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) econometric model representative of the financial statements of a firm. Although the model can be generalized to represent the financial statements of any firm, this work was carried out as a case study, where...

Transaction cost variance introduces a risk often neglected in portfolio optimization. We define a mean-variance portfolio optimization problem and show that including a transaction cost variance term significantly impacts the performance of these portfolios. Transaction cost variance is...

We jointly estimate a New Keynesian Policy Model with a Gaussian affine no-arbitrage specification of the term structure of interest rates, and assess how important inflation, output and monetary policy shocks are as sources of fluctuations in interest rates and the term premium. To mitigate...

This collection of papers analyzes the versatility and predictive power of survey expectations data in asset pricing and macroeconomic forecasting. The first paper, Using Sentiment Surveys to Predict GDP Growth and Stock Returns sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment...

The Fed's policy rule switches during the different phases of the business cycle. This finding is established using a dynamic mixture model to estimate regime-dependent Taylor-type rules on US quarterly data from 1960 to 2021. Instead of exogenously partitioning the data based on tenures of the...

The paper advances the log-generalized gamma distribution as a suitable generator of conditional skewness. Based on the NYSE composite daily returns an asMA-asQGARCH model along with skewness dynamics is estimated. The results indicate a skewness that varies between sizeable negative skewness...