Out-of-sample tests of forecast performance depend on how a given data set is split into estimation and evaluation periods, yet no guidance exists on how to choose the split point. Empirical forecast evaluation results can therefore be di cult to interpret, particularly when several values of...

We provide a comprehensive review of firms’ financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance—financing from all the nonmarket, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels,...

Most analyses of banking crises assume that banks use real contracts. However, in practice contracts are nominal and this is what is assumed here. We consider a standard banking model with aggregate return risk, aggregate liquidity risk and idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. We show that, with...

With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

In this paper we examine the competitive equilibria of a dynamic stochastic economy with complete markets and collateral constraints. We show that, provided both the set of asset payoffs and collateral levels are sufficiently rich, the equilibrium allocations with sequential trades and...

We study a model of occupational choice where workers must rely on their social contacts to acquire job vacancy information. Contrary to the existing literature, we allow for worker heterogeneity in terms of their idiosyncratic skill-types. In this case, the allocation of talent (the matching of...

We introduce the Realized Exponential GARCH model that can utilize multiple realized volatility measures for the modeling of a return series. The model specifies the dynamic properties of both returns and realized measures, and is characterized by a flexible modeling of the dependence between...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the capacity of an economic system to absorb shocks depends on the specific pattern of interconnections established among financial firms. The key trade-off at work is between the risk-sharing gains enjoyed by firms when they become more interconnected...

We establish the equivalence between a commonly used out-of-sample test of equal predictive accuracy and the difference between two Wald statistics. This equivalence greatly simplifies the computational burden of calculating recursive out-of-sample tests and evaluating their critical values. Our...

We introduce a multivariate GARCH model that incorporates realized measures of volatility and covolatility. The realized measures extract information about the current level of volatility and covolatility from high-frequency data, which is particularly useful for the modeling of return...