The mortgage backed securities market has dramatically declined during the credit crunch of 2007-2008. To understand the factors driving its demise we utilise a latent factor model representing common effects, asset rating effects, vintage of issuance effects and liquidity effects extending the recent representation of CDO pricing in Longstaff and Rajan (2008). Common and liquidity effects are ...

We introduce the Multivariate Autoregressive Conditional Double Poisson model to deal with discreteness, overdispersion and both auto and cross-correlation, arising with multivariate counts. We model counts with a double Poisson and assume that conditionally on past observations the means follow a Vector Autoregression. We resort to copulas to introduce contemporaneous correlation. We apply it ...

Factor models are widely used in summarizing large datasets with few underlying latent factors and in building time series forecasting models for economic variables. In these models, the reduction of the predictors and the modeling and forecasting of the response y are carried out in two separate and independent phases. We introduce a potentially more attractive alternative, Sufficient Dimensio...

In this study a regime switching approach is applied to estimate the chartist and fundamentalist (c&f) exchange rate model originally proposed by Frankel and Froot (1986). The empirical results suggest that this model does successfully explain daily DM/Dollar forward exchange rate dynamics from 1982 to 1998. Moreover, our findings turned out to be relative robust by estimating the model in subs...

Using data from a repeated public good game, I conduct a Granger causality test and find that contributions and beliefs about the contributions of others decline together, with neither variable leading the other. As a result, I model contributions and beliefs using a system of simultaneous equations. Estimating the system provides evidence on the magnitude of the projection bias. Since contribu...

We construct a no-arbitrage term structure model with jumps in the entire state vector at deterministic times but of random magnitudes. Jump risk premia are allowed for. We show that the model implies a closed-form representation of yields as a time-inhomogeneous affine function of the state vector, and derive other theoretical implications. We apply the model to the term structure of US Treasu...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo business survey contains information on the assessments of inventory stocks in manufacturing as well a...

Despite the single currency, yields on government bonds in the Euro Area deviate substantially from German bond yields. These bond spreads are usually attributed to differing default and liquidity risks. The empirical literature documents that evaluation of these risks is subject to time variation in global factors approximated by US corporate bond spreads or short term interest rates. Within t...

We consider whether oil prices can account for business cycle asymmetries. We test for asymmetries based on the Markov switching autoregressive model popularized by Hamilton (1989), using the tests devised by Clements and Krolzig (2000). We select the transformation of the oil price of Lee, Ni and Ratti (1995), based on a linear analysis of the relationship between output growth and the oil pri...

This paper proposes a new method to forecast S&P 500 return distribution by combining quantile regression models using macro-finance variables with volatility-based models including various standard EGARCH and stochastic volatility specifications. 30 density forecasting models are compared and combined in an out-of-sample forecasting exercise. Using macro-finance variables is found to help subs...