Mortality is different across countries, states and regions. Several empirical research works however reveal that mortality trends exhibit a common pattern and show similar structures across populations. The key element in analyzing mortality rate is a time-varying indicator curve. Our main...

Based on the Lee-Carter (LC) model, the benchmark in population forecasting, a variety of extensions and modifications are proposed in this paper. We investigate one of the extensions, the Hyndman-Ullah (HU) method and apply it to Asian demographic data sets: China, Japan and Taiwan. It combines...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper addresses the open debate about the effectiveness and practical relevance of high-frequency (HF) data in portfolio allocation. Our results demonstrate that when used with proper econometric models, HF data offers gains over daily data and more importantly these gains are maintained...

This paper addresses the open debate about the usefulness of high-frequency (HF) data in large-scale portfolio allocation. We consider the problem of constructing global minimum variance portfolios based on the constituents of the S&P 500 over a four-year period covering the 2008 financial...

Preferences differ in the population, and this heterogeneity may not be adequately described by observed characteristics and additive error terms. As a first contribution, this study shows that preference heterogeneity can be represented graphically by means of violations of the Weak Axiom of...

We introduce a robust, flexible and easy-to-implement method for estimating the yield curve from Treasury securities. This method is non-parametric and optimally learns basis functions in reproducing Hilbert spaces with an economically motivated smoothness reward. We provide a closed-form...

The Internet Appendix collects multiple results that support the results in the main text. Among others it includes implementation details, the results for the benchmark approaches, additional robustness results and a detailed description of the data

We propose a new test for structural changes in large dimensional factor models via a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) approach. If structural changes occur, the conventional principal component analysis fails to estimate common factors and factor loadings consistently. The estimated residuals...

This paper evaluates the effect of energy trading networks on the volatility of coal, oil, natural gas, and electricity. This research conducts a longitudinal analysis using a time series of static coal trading networks to generate a dynamic trading network and uses the component causality index...