In this paper I examine various extensions of the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model with the purpose of fitting and forecasting the term structure of interest rates. As expected, I find that using more flexible models leads to a better in-sample fit of the term structure. However, I show that the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'International Journal of Forecasting', 2009, 27, 282-303.<P> The sum of squared intraday returns provides an unbiased and almost error-free measure of ex-post volatility. In this paper we develop a nonlinear Autoregressive Fractionally...</p>

We examine the importance of incorporating macroeconomic information and, in particular, accounting for model uncertainty when forecasting the term structure of U.S.interest rates. We start off by analyzing and comparing the forecast performance of several individual term structure models. Our...

We evaluate the forecasting performance of time series models for realized volatility, which accommodate long memory, level shifts, leverage effects, day-of-the-week and holiday effects, as well as macroeconomic news announcements. Applying the models to daily realized volatility for the S&P 500...

The sum of squared intraday returns provides an unbiased and almost error-free measure of ex-post volatility. In this paper we develop a nonlinear Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) model for realized volatility, which accommodates level shifts, day-of-the-week...

This paper investigates the merits of high-frequency intraday data when forming minimum variance portfolios and minimum tracking error portfolios with daily rebalancing from the individual constituents of the S&P 100 index. We focus on the issue of determining the optimal sampling frequency,...

We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...