This paper challenges the commonly used unit root/cointegration approach for testing the Fisher effect for the economies of the G7 countries. We first prove that nominal interest and inflation rate can be better represented as being broken trend stationary variables. Later, we use the Bai-Perron procedure to show the existence of structural changes in the Fisher equation. When these characteris...

I use parametric and semiparametric methods to test for the order of integration in stock market indexes. The results, which are based on the EOE (Amsterdam), DAX (Frankfurt), Hang Seng (Hong Kong), FTSE100 (London), S&P500 (New York), CAC40 (Paris), Singapore All Shares, and the Japanese Nikkei, show that in almost all of the series the unit root hypothesis cannot be rejected. The Hang Seng an...

This paper examines the hypothesis that both stock returns and volatility are asymmetrical functions of past information from the US market. By employing a double-threshold GARCH model to investigate six major index-return series, we find strong evidence supporting the asymmetrical hypothesis of stock returns. Specifically, negative news from the US market will cause a larger decline in a natio...

Consider a non-standard parametric estimation problem, such as the estimation of the AR(1) coefficient close to the unit root. We develop a numerical algorithm that determines an estimator that is nearly (mean or median) unbiased, and among all such estimators, comes close to minimizing a weighted average risk criterion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our generic approach by also applying it ...

In this paper we investigate whether macroeconomic uncertainty could distort banks’ allocation of loanable funds. To provide a road– map for our empirical investigation, we present a simple framework which demonstrates that lower uncertainty about the return from lending should lead to a more unequal distribution of lending across banks as managers take advantage of more precise knowledge of di...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the short-term interest-rate dynamics based on three different data sets and two flexible parametric specifications. The significance of nonlinearity in the short-rate drift declines with increasing maturity for the interest-rate series used in the study. Using a flexible diffusion specification and incorporating GARCH volatility and non-normal in...

Stable autoregressive models are considered with martingale differences errors scaled by an unknown nonparametric time-varying function generating heterogeneity. An important special case involves structural change in the error variance, but in most practical cases the pattern of variance change over time is unknown and may involve shifts at unknown discrete points in time, continuous evolution...

This paper considers the construction of median unbiased forecasts for near-integrated autoregressive processes. It derives the appropriately scaled limiting distribution of the deviation of the forecast from the true conditional mean. The dependence of the limiting distribution on nuisance parameters precludes the use of the standard asymptotic and bootstrap methods for bias correction. We pro...

Stable autoregressive models are considered with martingale differences errors scaled by an unknown nonparametric time-varying function generating heterogeneity. An important special case involves structural change in the error variance, but in most practical cases the pattern of variance change over time is unknown and may involve shifts at unknown discrete points in time, continuous evolution...

The paper investigates asymptotically efficient inference in general time series likelihood models with time varying parameters. Inference procedures for general loss functions are evaluated by a weighted average risk criterion. The weight function focusses on persistent parameter paths of moderate magnitude, and is proportional to the distribution function of a Gaussian random walk. It is show...