Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns strictly increase in an underlying characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, one needs to take the entire range of the characteristic into account, as is done in the recent proposal of Patton and Timmermann...

In this paper we extend the Stock and Watson's (Leading economic indicators, new approaches and forecasting records, 1991) single-index dynamic factor model in an econometric framework that has the advantage of combining information from real and financial indicators published at different...

Over the past 10 years dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have become an important tool in quantitative macroeconomics. However, DSGE models were not considered as a forecasting tool until very recently. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we compare the forecasting...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference...

Predicting default probabilities is at the core of credit risk management and is becoming more and more important for banks in order to measure their client's degree of risk, and for firms to operate successfully. The SVM with evolutionary feature selection is applied to the CreditReform...

This paper applies the Model Confidence Set (MCS) procedure of Hansen, Lunde, and Nason (2003) to a set of volatility models. A MCS is analogous to confidence interval of a parameter in the sense that the former contains the best forecasting model with a certain probability. The key to the MCS...

This paper investigates the role of published stock recommendations in print and online media as investor sentiment in the near-term German stock market. In line with extant literature on other sentiment measures, vector autoregressions reveal that past stock returns drive today's sentiment, but...