Financial risk model evaluation or backtesting is a key part of the internal model's approach to market risk management as laid out by the Basle Commitee on Banking Supervision (1996). However, existing backtesting methods such as those developed in Christoffersen (1998), have relatively small...

We present new evidence on disaggregated profit and loss (P/L) and Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts obtained from a large international commercial bank. Our dataset includes the actual daily P/L generated by four separate business lines within the bank. All four business lines are involved in...

Models used for natural resources prices usually preclude the possibility of large changes (jumps) resulting from discrete, unexpected events. To test for the presence of jumps and ARCH effects, we propose to use bounds and bootstrap test techniques, thus solving the unidentified nuisance...

We analyze the limiting distribution of the Rivers and Vuong (2002, <italic>Econometrics Journal</italic> 5, 1–39) statistic for choosing between two competing dynamic models based on a comparison of generalized method of moments minimands. It is shown that (i) if both models are misspecified then the...

We introduce a new method for drawing state variables in Gaussian state space models from their conditional distribution given parameters and observations. Unlike standard methods, our method does not involve Kalman filtering. We show that for some important cases, our method is computationally...

Simulation smoothing involves drawing state variables (or innovations) in discrete time state-space models from their conditional distribution given parameters and observations. Gaussian simulation smoothing is of particular interest, not only for the direct analysis of Gaussian linear models,...

We introduce a new method for drawing state variables in Gaussian state space models from their conditional distribution given parameters and observations. Unlike standard methods, our method does not involve Kalman filtering. We show that for some important cases, our method is computationally...