This paper examines which macroeconomic and financial variables are most informative for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from a forecasting perspective. The analysis is conducted for the FOMC decision during the period January 1990 - June...

Institutional investors must deal with irrevocable commitments, cash flow uncertainty, and illiquidity when making new commitments to maintain their portfolio exposure to private equity funds. This study develops a dynamic recommitment strategy to preserve the strategic allocation to private...

Existing studies on interest rate forecasting either treat yields as being stationary around a fixed mean or as a random walk process. In this study we consider forecasting the term structure of interest rates with the assumption that the yield curve is driven by factors that are stationary...

This paper considers the uncertainty associated with upcoming Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements and the extent to which the market begins to set up for such announcements well before they actually occur. We demonstrate that markets set up well in advance of known announcement...

The Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model by Engle (2002) has become an extremely popular tool for modeling the time-varying dependence of asset returns. However, applications to large cross-sections have been found to be problematic, due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose a novel...

We propose a new approach to deal with structural breaks in time series models. The key contribution is an alternative dynamic stochastic specification for the model parameters which describes potential breaks. After a break new parameter values are generated from a so-called baseline prior...

The accuracy of real-time forecasts of macroeconomic variables that are subject to revisions may crucially depend on the choice of data used to compare the forecasts against. We put forward a flexible time - varying parameter regression framework to obtain early estimates of the final value of...

This paper considers financial, operational, solvency, and performance ratios, in order to detect when there were balance sheets' variations related to the 1994 Mexican currency crisis. Quarterly results for 88 non-financial Mexican companies that survived the crisis are used, and tests for...

We examine competing explanations, based on risk and behavioral models, for the profitability ofstock selection strategies in emerging markets. We document that both emerging market risk and global risk factors cannot account for the significant excess returns of selection strategies based on...

This paper presents empirical evidence that security analysts do not efficiently use publicly available macroeconomic information in their earnings forecasts for emerging market stocks. Analysts completely ignore forecasts on political stability, while these provide valuable information for...