This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to banking, credit markets and financial stability. Paper [I] presents a credit market model and finds, using an agent based modeling approach, that credit crunches have a tendency to occur; even when credit markets are almost entirely...

The globalisation on financial markets and the development of financial derivatives has increased not only chances but also potential risk within the banking industry. Especially market risk has gained major significance since market price variation of interest rates, stocks or exchange rates...

The globalisation on financial markets and the development of financial derivatives has increased not only chances but also potential risk within the banking industry. Especially market risk has gained major significance since market price variation of interest rates, stocks or exchange rates...

We compare more than 1000 different volatility models in terms of their fit to the historical ISE-100 Index data and their forecasting performance of the conditional variance in an out-of-sample setting. Exponential GARCH model of Nelson (1991) with “constant mean, t-distribution, one lag...

We compare 330 ARCH-type models in terms of their ability to describe the conditional variance. The models are compared out-of-sample using DM-$ exchange rate data and IBM return data, where the latter is based on a new data set of realized variance. We find no evidence that a GARCH(1,1) is...

This research paper is aimed at diagnosing the pricing inefficiencies prevailing in the Indian index options market. The inefficiencies are being revealed by testing the rational expectations hypothesis on the term structure of implied volatilities of index options. In the paper, an effort has...

This paper examines whether the preliminary releases of GDP incorporate efficiently all available information or whether the preliminary estimates contain information that can be useful in predicting forthcoming GDP data revisions. Forecast rationality tests are applied to distinguish between...

Average balances in a business checking account at commercial banks derive out of excess receipts over disbursements during the course of a normal month of transaction activity. Such balances - which are in a sense volunteered to the bank by the customer - can serve to lower the nominal loan...

We report three new findings that rely upon the high-low price range as an estimate of stock return variance. The predictability of variance is associated with persistence in high prices and with correlated shocks to high and low prices. Excess stock returns are positively related to anticipated...

We propose serial correlation-robust asymptotic confidence bands for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its functional, viz. the area under ROC curve (AUC), estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood in the binormal model. Our simulation experiments confirm that this new method...