This paper shows that oil shocks primarily impact economic growth through the conditional variance of growth. Our comparison of models focuses on density forecasts. Over a range of dynamic models, oil shock measures and data we fi nd a robust link between oil shocks and the volatility of...

This paper extends the Bayesian semiparametric stochastic volatility (SV-DPM) model of Jensen and Maheu (2010). Instead of using a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) to model return innovations, we use an infinite hidden Markov model (IHMM). This allows for time variation in the return density...

This paper suggests a new approach to evaluate realized covariance (RCOV) estimators via their predictive power on return density. By jointly modeling returns and RCOV measures under a Bayesian framework, the predictive density of returns and ex-post covariance measures are bridged. The forecast...