In this article, simple tests of the random walk hypothesis are proposed that are robust against various kinds of conditional heteroskedasticity, non-stationarities, calendar effects and non-synchronous trading effects. In contrast, conventional tests are usually only robust against conditional...

In practice, it is often impossible to assess the validity of the smoothness assumptions crucial to standard tests for singularities in the spectrum. We therefore propose new tests which are completely insensitive to sharp peaks in the absolutely continuous part of the spectrum. Using Neyman...

This paper extends an optimal frequency domain test for the detection of synchronous patterns in multiple time series to the case of fuzzy patterns, which are not confined to single frequencies or narrow frequency bands. Applying this extension to corn futures with different delivery dates, we...

This paper proposes a modification of an optimal test for cycles in multiple time series and applies it to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between stock returns and the phases of the moon. No significant relationship is found, which is in line with the evidence from descriptive...

New methods to forecast volatility are usually compared to simple methods like weighted moving averages or GARCH (1, 1) models. In this paper, we provide new benchmark methods which are more accurate but still very simple. In an empirical study of daily returns on major world indices, our new...

This paper first reduces the problem of detecting structural breaks in a random walk to that of finding the best subset of explanatory variables in a regression model and then tailors various subset selection criteria to this specific problem. Of particular interest are those new criteria, which...

Surface temperature is a major indicator of climate change. To test for the presence of an upward trend in surface-temperature (global warming), sophisticated statistical methods are typically used which depend on implausible and/or unverifiable assumptions, in particular on the availability of...

Previous findings indicate that the inclusion of dynamic factors obtained from a large set of predictors can improve macroeconomic forecasts. In this paper, we explore three possible further developments: (i) using automatic criteria for choosing those factors which have the greatest predictive...