There is a growing consensus that part of the surge in government bond spreads during the EMU debt crisis can be explained by wake-up-call contagion. Evidence on pure contagion however is very mixed and there are no insights into the dynamics of these effects. As a contribution to fill this gap,...

The persistence of inflation rates is of major importance to central banks due to the fact that it determines the costs of monetary policy according to the Phillips curve. This article is motivated by newly available econometric methods which allow for a consistent estimation of the persistence...

The level of daily stock returns is generally regarded as unpredictable. Instead of the level, we focus on the signs of these returns and generate forecasts using various statistical classification techniques, such as logistic regression, generalized additive models, or neural networks. The...

Models based on factors such as size, value, or momentum are ubiquitous in asset pricing. Therefore, portfolio allocation and risk management require estimates of the volatility of these factors. While realized volatility has become a standard tool for liquid individual assets, this measure is...

Realized volatility underestimates the variance of daily stock index returns by an average of 14 percent. This is documented for a wide range of international stock indices, using the fact that the average of realized volatility and that of squared returns should be the same over longer time...

We propose a family of self-normalized CUSUM tests for structural change under long memory. The test statistics apply non-parametric kernel-based fixed-b and fixed-m long-run variance estimators and have well-defined limiting distributions that only depend on the long-memory parameter. A Monte...

This paper extends the popular Diebold-Mariano test to situations when the forecast error loss differential exhibits long memory. It is shown that this situation can arise frequently, since long memory can be transmitted from forecasts and the forecast objective to forecast error loss...

This paper derives the memory of the product series xtyt, where xt and yt are stationary long memory time series of orders dx and dy, respectively. Special attention is paid to the case of squared series and products of series driven by a common stochastic factor. It is found that the memory of...