Is there asymmetry in the distribution of government bond returns in developed countries? Can asymmetries be predicted using financial and macroeconomic variables? To answer the first question, we provide evidence for asymmetry in government bond returns in particular for short maturities. This...

In this paper, we consider the matrix vectorization operator termed the vecd operator, which has recently been introduced in the literature. This operator stacks up distinct elements of a symmetric matrix in a way that differs from that of the well-known vech operator; it stacks up not columns,...

In this note, I review how to impose the stationarity and invertibility conditions in estimating ARMA models with unconstrained optimization. Specifically, I reintroduce a convenient transformation of unconstrained variables proposed by Jones (1980), illustrating how to compute its inverse...

In this paper, I propose a simple methodology for inferring the correlation between permanent and transitory shocks in unidentified unobserved components (UC) models, where the correlation is not identified. However, I show that there is an upper bound of the correlation implied from the...

Information matrix (IM) test (White, 1982) has been used for detecting general model misspecification in the applied econometrics literature. Two of the most commonly used asymptotic covariance matrix estimators (ACMEs) for the IM test are the one that White (1982) proposed in his original paper...

In this note, I consider a general class of unobserved components (UC) models and derive a relevant inequality. This inequality implies that either of the two assumptions of standard UC models, namely, a random walk trend and uncorrelated shocks, is not satisfied if the impulse response measure...

The well known Jarque-Bera (JB) test for normality uses the sample mean and sample standard deviation for estimating the population mean and population standard deviation. Instead of the sample standard deviation, Gel and Gastwirth (2008) proposed to use a robust scale estimator, known as the...