We focus on capturing the increasingly important role that emerging economies play in determining U.S. import prices. Emerging market producers differ from others in two respects: (1) their cost structure is well below that of developed-market producers, and (2) their wide profit margins induce...

We examine the sources of macroeconomic economic fluctuations by estimating a variety of medium-scale DSGE models within a unified framework that incorporates regime switching both in shock variances and in the inflation target. Our general framework includes a number of different model features...

The empirical joint distribution of return-pairs on stock indices displays high tail-dependence in the lower tail and low tail-dependence in the upper tail. The presence of tail-dependence is not compatible with the assumption of (conditional) joint normality. The presence of asymmetric-tail...

The capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM) is one of the most popular methods of financial market analysis. But, evidence of the poor empirical performance of the CAPM has accumulated in the literature. For example, based on their empirical results regarding the relation between market Beta and...

The paper attempts to provide an appropriate model specification for identifying technology and other macroeconomic shocks in a structural VAR framework. The investigation is conducted based on two seminal structural VAR studies by Gali (1999) and King et al. (1991). The models of these studies...

An asymmetric multivariate generalization of the recently proposed class of normal mixture GARCH models is developed. Issues of parametrization and estimation are discussed. Conditions for covariance stationarity and the existence of the fourth moment are derived, and expressions for the dynamic...

We develop a multivariate generalization of the Markov-switching GARCH model introduced by Haas, Mittnik, and Paolella (2004b) and derive its fourth-moment structure. An application to international stock markets illustrates the relevance of accounting for volatility regimes from both a...

Bis zum Amtsantritt von Gary Gensler ging die US Commodity Futures Trading Commission von einem geringen Einfluss der Spekulanten auf den Rohölpreis aus, während nun eine Neubewertung stattfindet.Dieser Artikel misst die Aktivität der Spekulanten mit Hilfe von Variablen der wöchentlichen...

This article discusses the influence of speculators in the futures market on crude oil prices. The results suggest the dispersion in beliefs influences both crude oil prices and price volatility.

Successful descriptions of short-term nominal interest rates inertial behavior have frequently been obtained with small scale macro models in which a Central Banker minimizes a loss function embedding an argument labelled as interest rate smoothing. The rationale for this argument is not...