This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

The present work applies several advanced spectral methods to the analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations in three countries of the European Union: Italy, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. We focus here in particular on singular-spectrum analysis (SSA), which provides valuable spatial and...

This paper presents a set of tools, which allow gathering information about the frequency components of a time-series. We focus on the concepts rather than giving too much weight to mathematical technicalities. In a first step, we discuss spectral analysis and filtering methods. Spectral...

We develop new tail-trimmed M-estimation methods for heavy tailed Nonlinear AR-GARCH models. Tail-trimming allows both identification of the true parameter and asymptotic normality for nonlinear models with asymmetric errors. In heavy tailed cases the rate of convergence is infinitesimally close...

A new method for identifying bull and bear financial market regimes is proposed, related to a classic algorithm for picking turning points in the business cycle. Our approach uses only a single discrete parameter, adjusted to the periodicity of the data, which largely removes subjectivity from...