We analyze portfolio credit risk in light of dynamic quot;frailty,quot; by which the credit qualities of different firms depend on common unobservable time-varying default covariates. Frailty is estimated to have a large impact on estimated conditional mean default rates, above and beyond those...

In credit default prediction models, the need to deal with time-varying covariates often arises. For instance, in the context of corporate default prediction a typical approach is to estimate a hazard model by regressing the hazard rate on time-varying covariates like balance sheet or stock...

The U.S. labor market has been experiencing unprecedented high average unemployment duration. The shift in the unemployment duration distribution can be traced back to the early nineties. In this study, censored quantile regression methods are employed to analyze the changes in the US...

For a time-continuous discrete-state Markov process as model for rating transitions, we study the time-stationarity by means of a likelihood ratio test. For multiple Markov process data from a multiplicative intensity model, maximum likelihood parameter estimates can be represented as martingale...

In this paper we develop procedures for performing inference in regression models about how potential policy interventions affect the entire marginal distribution of an outcome of interest. These policy interventions consist of either changes in the distribution of covariates related to the...

Housing wealth is a large component of total wealth and plays an important role in aggregate business cycles. In this paper, we explore data on real house price cycles at the aggregate level and city level for the United States and Canada. Using a panel of 137 cities, we examine the duration,...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

Classical business cycles, following Burns and Mitchell (1946), can be defined as the sequential pattern of expansions and contractions in aggregate economic activity. Recently, Harding and Pagan (2002, 2006) have provided an econometric toolkit for the analysis of these cycles, and this has...

We propose a local adaptive multiplicative error model (MEM) accommodating timevarying parameters. MEM parameters are adaptively estimated based on a sequential testing procedure. A data-driven optimal length of local windows is selected, yielding adaptive forecasts at each point in time....