In this paper the author attempts an analysis of the current financial/economic crisis that is wider ranging and more fundamental than he has been able to find. For this purpose he reviews some social science literature that views the current crisis as an episode in the secular decline of the...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochastic volatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on ap proach which is easily implemented in empirical...

The topic of volatility measurement and estimation is central to financial and more generally time series econometrics. In this paper, we begin by surveying models of volatility, both discrete and continuous, and then we summarize some selected empirical findings from the literature. In...