A discrete time model of financial markets is considered. It is assumed that the stock price evolution is described by a homogeneous Markov chain. In the focus of attention is the expected value of the guaranteed profit of the investor that arises when the jumps of the stock price are bounded....

A discrete time model of financial markets is considered. It is assumed that the relative jumps of the risky security price are independent non-identically distributed random variables. In the focus of attention is the expected non-risky profit of the investor that arises when the jumps of the...

We suggest a theoretical basis for the comparative evaluation of forecasts. Instead of the general assumption that the data is generated from a stochastic model, we classify three stages of prediction experiments: pure non-stochastic prediction of given data, stochastic prediction of given data,...

In a panel of West African countries, we investigate whether data on immigrant remittance flows can be used to improve on predictive accuracy of aggregate demand in a systematic way. The results of the prediction experiments are compared to traditional significance tests of asymmetric error...

This paper explores the seasonal cycles of European agricultural commodity prices. We focus on three food crops (barley, soft and durum wheat) and on beef. We investigate whether seasonality is deterministic or unit-root stochastic and whether seasonal cycle for specific agricultural commodities...

We use data generated by a macroeconomic DSGE model to study the relative benefits of forecast combinations based on forecast-encompassing tests relative to simple uniformly weighted forecast averages across rival models. Assumed rival models are four linear autoregressive specifications, one of...

For many economic time-series variables that are observed regularly and frequently, for example weekly, the underlying activity is not distributed uniformly across the year. For the aim of predicting annual data, one may consider temporal aggregation into larger subannual units based on an...

We investigate whether and to what extent multiple encompassing tests may help determine weights for forecast averaging in a standard vector autoregressive setting. To this end we consider a new test-based procedure, which assigns non-zero weights to candidate models that add information not...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

We verify whether cocoa prices could be a source of inflation in five countries of the West African region within a framework that includes other variables such as migrant remittances to the region and a fiscal policy variable represented by the government budget deficit. Unlike earlier studies...