We predict bond betas conditioning on a number of macro-finance variables. We explore differences across long-term government bonds, investment grade corporate bonds, and high yield corporate bonds. We conduct out-of-sample forecasting using the new approach of combining predictor variables...

In this paper, we test for contagion within the East Asian region, contagion being defined as a significant increase in the degree of comovement between stock returns in different countries. For this purpose, we use a parameter stability test, and, following [Rigobon, R., 2003a. On the...

We contribute to the debate on whether the large U.S. federal budget deficits are sustainable in the long run. We model the U.S. government deficit per capita as a threshold autoregressive process. We find evidence that the U.S. budget deficit is sustainable in the long run and that economic...

We utilize a stochastic volatility model to analyse the possible effects of inflation targeting on the trade-off between output gap variability and inflation variability. We find that the adoption of inflation targets (in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK, Sweden and Finland) might result...

This paper focuses on a possible explanation for the weakness of the euro, namely the lack of transparency of the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy. In order to obtain a time-varying measure of monetary policy uncertainty in both the U.S. and Euroland, we estimate a Stochastic...

Applied macroeconomists have tested for the government intertemporal solvency condition by either testing for linear stationarity in the total government deficit series or testing for linear cointegration between total government spending and total tax revenues. A number of authors have focused,...

In this paper we examine whether during the 1997 East Asian crisis there was any contagion from the four largest economies in the region (Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Malaysia) to a number of developed countries (Japan, UK, Germany and France). Following Forbes and Rigobon (2002), we test for...