Is it theoretically legitimate for an investor to attempt to outperform the market index? Or is the investor simply deluding himself? The purpose of this paper is to apply the new Theory of Rational Beliefs (RB) to demonstrate the following result: Even when all agents have symmetric...

Despite more than half a century of research on forecasting stock market returns, most predictive models perform quite poorly when they are put to the test of actually predicting equity returns. In fact, many authors, including Bossaerts and Hillion (1999), Brennan and Xia (2005), and Welch and...

This study derives an optimal macroeconomic policy combination for financial sector stability in the United Kingdom by employing a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) framework. The empirical results obtained show that disciplined fiscal and accommodative monetary...

We apply Bayesian Model Averaging and a frequentistic model space analysis to assess the pricing-determinants of credit default swaps (CDS). Our study focuses on the complete model space of plausible models covering most of the variables and specifications used elsewhere in the literature,...

With the aim of constructing predictive distributions for daily returns, we introduce a new Markov normal mixture model in which the components are themselves normal mixtures. We derive the restrictions on the autocovariances and linear representation of integer powers of the time series in...

Suppose a fund manager uses predictors in changing port-folio allocations over time. How does predictability translate into portfolio decisions? To answer this question we derive a new model within the Bayesian framework, where managers are assumed to modulate the systematic risk in part by...

We study market perception of sovereign credit risk in the euro area during the financial crisis. In our analysis we use a parsimonious CDS pricing model to estimate the probability of default (PD) and the loss given default (LGD) as perceived by financial markets. We find that separate...

We analyze the market assessment of sovereign credit risk in an emerging market using a reduced-form model to price the credit default swap (CDS) spreads thus enabling us to derive values for the probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) from the quotes of sovereign CDS contracts....

This article investigates parameter estimation of affine term structure models by means of the generalized method of moments. Exact moments of the affine latent process as well as of the yields are obtained by using results derived for p-polynomial processes. Then the generalized method of...

This paper extends the benchmark Macro-Finance model by introducing, next to the standard macroeconomic factors, additional liquidity-related and return forecasting factors. Liquidity factors are obtained from a decomposition of the TED spread while the return-forecasting (risk premium) factor...