Expert opinion is an opinion given by an expert, and it can have significant value in forecasting key policy variables in economics and finance. Expert forecasts can either be expert opinions, or forecasts based on an econometric model. An expert forecast that is based on an econometric model is...

The primary purpose of the paper is to answer the following two questions regarding the performance of the influential Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve System, in comparison with the forecasts contained in the “Greenbooks†of the professional staff of the...

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most real exchange rates as temporary deviations from fixed long-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibria themselves, see Engel (2000). We implement this idea using an unobserved components model and decompose the observations...

In 1993, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) introduced the Volatility Index, VIX, based on S&P100 options (OEX), which quickly became the benchmark for stock volatility. As VIX is based on real-time option prices, it reflects investors’ consensual view of future expected stock...

Upon examining own volatility dependency for the three major sectors, namely Service, Industrial and Banking, in four GCC economies (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE), the empirical findings suggest that Banking seems to be the least sensitive among the sectors to past own volatility, while...

Under the Basel II Accord, banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) have to communicate their daily risk estimates to the monetary authorities at the beginning of the trading day, using a variety of Value-at-Risk (VaR) models to measure risk. Sometimes the risk estimates...

A flexible decomposition of a time series into stochastic cycles under possible non-stationarity is specified, providing both a useful data analysis tool and a very wide model class. A Bayes procedure using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is introduced with a model averaging approach which...

Crude oil price volatility has been analyzed extensively for organized spot, forward and futures markets for well over a decade, and is crucial for forecasting volatility and Value-at-Risk (VaR). There are four major benchmarks in the international oil market, namely West Texas Intermediate...

This paper estimates univariate and multivariate conditional volatility and conditional correlation models of spot, forward and futures returns from three major benchmarks of international crude oil markets, namely Brent, WTI and Dubai, to aid in risk diversification. Conditional correlations...

The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders and holds great importance and significance for the world’s environmental balance. Around 60% of the Amazon rainforest is located in the Brazilian territory. The two biggest states of the Amazon region are...