For many countries located around the equatorial region, climate phenomenon such as El Niño southern oscillation or ENSO has enormous impact on their economies. In the case of countries with a high degree of dependency on water resources for energy generation, the impact of ENSO has been...

To accommodate the inhomogenous character of financial time series over longer time periods, standard parametric models can be extended by allowing their coefficients to vary over time. Focusing on conditional heteroscedasticity models, we discuss various strategies to identify and estimate...

One of the reasons why investors were not prepared for heavy losses in the stock markets that occurred after the beginning of sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. lies in the curious fact that many practitioners were led to believe that there are so many independent agents participating in the...

We investigate the relative performance of a wide array of Value at Risk (VaR) models with the daily returns of Turkish (XU100) and Croatian (CROBEX) stock index prior to and during the ongoing financial crisis. In addition to widely used VaR models, we also study the behaviour of conditional...

The aim of this paper is to forecast (out-of-sample) the distribution of financial returns based on realized volatility measures constructed from high-frequency returns. We adopt a semi-parametric model for the distribution by assuming that the return quantiles depend on the realized measures...

The aim of this paper is to determine whether forward-looking option-implied returns forecasts lead to better out-of-sample portfolio performance than conventional time series models. We consider a simple two-asset setting with a risk-free asset and the S&P 500 index the risky asset with monthly...

This paper focuses on a number of newly proposed on-line forecast combination algorithms in Sancetta (2010), Yang (2004), and Wei and Yang (2012). We first establish certain asymptotic properties of these algorithms and compare them with the Bates and Granger (1969) method. We then show that...

I present evidence of systematically heterogeneous expectations, a violation of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis. I demonstrate that the expectations of different gender and wealth cohorts have different relative abilities to predict inflation, interest rates, unemployment, income, stock...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight...

Measuring and modeling financial volatility is the key to derivative pricing, asset allocation and risk management. The recent availability of high-frequency data allows for refined methods in this field. In particular, more precise measures for the daily or lower frequency volatility can be...