Extreme value theory (EVT) holds promise for advancing the assessment and management of extreme financial risks. Recent literature suggests that the application of EVT generally results in more precise estimates of extreme quantiles and tail probabilities of financial asset returns. This article...

Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately,...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately,...

Until about twenty years ago, the consensus view on the cause of financial-system distress was fairly simple: a run on one bank could easily turn to a panic involving runs on all banks, destroying some and disrupting the financial system. Since then, however, a series of events—such as...

Biographical note: Francis X. Diebold is the Paul F. and Warren S. Miller Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and professor of finance and statistics at the university's Wharton School. Glenn D. Rudebusch is executive vice president and director of economic research at the...

In this dissertation, we analyze whether the noise ratio statistic of Durlauf and Hall (1989), NRT, can be used as a non-nested model selection tool in a similar fashion to the Rivers and Vuong (2002) framework. For this purpose, we first show that, when scaled by the sample size T, NRT is...

The increased importance of fragmentation in world trade has created an interest among trade economists to explain the determinants of trade in intermediate goods. A substantial part of trade in intermediates between the US and OECD countries takes the form of intra-industry (IIT). I have...

This dissertaion is comprised of two essays on econometric evaluation of models of commodity futures prices. The first essay develops a frequency- domain volatility bound approach that can be used to evaluate possibly mis-specified models. The proposed method allows us to detect model failures...