This article evaluates the predictability of the equity risk premium in the United States by comparing the individual and complementary predictive power of macroeconomic variables which are popular in academia and technical indicators which are widely used by practitioners in the market using a...

While macroeconomic variables have been used extensively to forecast the U.S. equity risk premium and build models to explain it, relatively little attention has been paid to the technical stock market indicators widely employed by practitioners. Our paper fills this gap by studying the...

In this paper, we examine the directional predictability of excess stock market returns by lagged excess returns from industry portfolios and a number of other commonly used variables by means of dynamic probit models. We focus on the directional component of the market returns because, for...

The equity premium follows a pronounced v-shape pattern around the beginning of recessions. It sharply drops into negative territory just before business cycle peaks and then strongly recovers as the recession unfolds. Recessions are preceded by an inverted yield curve. Thus probit models using...

The equity premium follows a pronounced v-shape pattern around the beginning of recessions. It sharply drops into negative territory just before business cycle peaks and then strongly recovers as the recession unfolds. Recessions are preceded by an inverted yield curve. Thus probit models using...

Given the tremendous growth of factor allocation strategies in active and passive fund management, we investigate whether factor or sector asset allocation strategies provide investors with a superior performance. Our focus is on comparing factor versus sector allocations as some recent...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariance matrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). It is shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systems by means of a two-step strategy. The finite...

Under the Basel II Accord, banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) have to communicate their daily risk estimates to the monetary authorities at the beginning of the trading day, using a variety of Value-at-Risk (VaR) models to measure risk. Sometimes the risk estimates...

The use of mixture distributions for modeling asset returns has a long history in finance. New methods of demonstrating support for the presence of mixtures in the multivariate case are provided. The use of a two-component multivariate normal mixture distribution, coupled with shrinkage via a...