We characterize equity return volatility connectedness in the network of major American and European financial institutions, 2004-2014. Our methods enable precise characterization of the timing and evolution of key aspects of the financial crisis. First, we find that during 2007-2008 the...

The authors sketch a framework for monitoring macroeconomic activity in real-time and push it in new directions. In particular, they focus not only on real activity, which has received most attention to date, but also on inflation and its interaction with real activity. As for the recent...

The authors propose several connectedness measures built from pieces of variance decompositions, and they argue that they provide natural and insightful measures of connectedness among financial asset returns and volatilities. The authors also show that variance decompositions define weighted,...

The possibility of exact maximum likelihood estimation of many observation-driven models remains an open question. Often only approximate maximum likelihood estimation is attempted, because the unconditional density needed for exact estimation is not known in closed form. Using simulation and...

A sleepy consensus has emerged that U.S. GNP data are uninformative as to whether trend is better described as deterministic or stochastic. Although the distinction is not critical in some contexts, it is important for point forecasting, because the two models imply very different long-run...

Many recent theoretical papers have come under attack for modeling prices as Geometric Brownian Motion. This process can diverge over time, implying that firms facing this price process can earn infinite profits. We explore the significance of this attack and contrast investment under Geometric...