Economic value calculations are increasingly used to compare the predictive performance of competing models of asset returns. However, they lack a rigorous way to validate their evidence. This paper proposes a new methodology to test whether utility gains accruing to investors using competing predictive models are equal to zero. Monte Carlo evidence indicates that our testing procedure, that ca...

Technical traders base their analysis on the premise that the patterns in market prices are assumed to recur in the future, and thus, these patterns can be used for predictive purposes. This paper uses the daily Dow Jones Industrial Average Index from 1897 to 1988 to examine the linear and nonlinear predictability of stock market returns with simple technical trading rules. The nonlinear specif...

Integrated assessment models of climate change typically analyze the case of a doubling of atmospheric CO2.over the pre-industrial concentration of about 270 ppm. This is a serious shortcoming since under a scenario in which all accessible fossil fuels are burned, atmospheric CO2 concentrations will more than quadruple. We introduce an analytical framework that endogenously accounts for potenti...

The general-to-specific (GETS) approach to modelling is widely employed in the modelling of economic series, but less so in financial volatility modelling due to computational complexity when many explanatory variables are involved. This study proposes a simple way of avoiding this problem and undertakes an out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the methodology applied to the modelling of weekly ...

In recent “learning to forecast” experiments (Hommes et al. 2005), three different patterns in aggregate price behavior have been observed: slow monotonic convergence, permanent oscillations, and dampened fluctuations. We show that a simple model of individual learning can explain these different aggregate outcomes within the same experimental setting. The key idea is evolutionary selection amo...

We derive forecasts for Markov switching models that are optimal in the MSFE sense by means of weighting observations. We provide analytic expressions of the weights conditional on the Markov states and conditional on state probabilities. This allows us to study the e↵ect of uncertainty around states on forecasts. It emerges that, even in large samples, forecasting performance increases substan...

Recent evidence suggests that many economic time series are subject to structural breaks, yet little is known about the properties of alternative forecasting methods for such data. This paper proposes a new method for determining the window size that explores the trade-off between bias and forecast error variance to minimize the mean squared forecast error in the presence of breaks in autoregre...

Alternative strategies for predicting stock market volatility are examined. In out-of-sample forecasting experiments implied-volatility information, derived from contemporaneously observed option prices or history-based volatility predictors, such as GARCH models, are investigated, to determine if they are more appropriate for predicting future return volatility. Employing German DAX-index retu...

Prediction Markets in Theory and Practice Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as “information markets,” “idea futures” or “event futures”, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts. This article summarizes the recent literature on prediction markets, highlighting b...

This paper analyzes extreme co-movements between the Australian and Canadian commodity currencies, and the gold and oil markets respectively, within a multivariate extension of the Hawkes-POT model. The intensity of extreme events in the Australian dollar are influenced by extreme events in gold, while the size of extreme events in the Canadian dollar are driven by extreme events in crude oil. ...