Although the scalar components methodology used to build VARMA models is rather difficult, the VAR models application being easier in practice, the forecasts based on the first models have a higher degree of accuracy. This statement is demonstrated for variables like the 3-month Treasury bill rate and the spread between the 10 year government bond yield, where the quarterly data are from the U....

Since financial derivatives are key instruments for risk taking as well as risk reduction, it is only straightforward to examine their role in currency crises. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the impact of currency futures trading on the underlying exchange rates. After a discussion of trading mechanisms and trader types, the linkage between futures trading activity and spot ma...

Article history: Received 1 April 2010 Received in revised form 3 August 2011 Accepted 4 August 2011 Available online 11 August 2011 This paper uses a tri-variate structural VAR with a long-run identification scheme, akin to the Blanchard and Quah method, to identify external and domestic supply and demand shocks in 22 African countries between 1980 and 2005. Domestic supply shocks are found to...

This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches to the analysis of the business cycle and in doing so it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the ‘classical’ approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business cycle; we then adopt the ‘modern’ alternative: the Markov-switching time series model proposed in Hamilton ...

This paper investigates the causes of China’s output and trade balance fluctuations in the period of 1985–2000, with special attention to the role of the real exchange rate. The effects of four types of shock – the foreign supply shock, the domestic supply shock, the relative demand shock and the nominal shock – are examined, employing a near -VAR that embodies the long-run properties of a ‘dep...

Article history: Received 18 July 2013 Received in revised form 9 May 2014 Accepted 15 May 2014 Available online 22 May 2014 Highly volatile scenarios, such as those provoked by the recent subprime and sovereign debt crises, have questioned the accuracy of current risk forecasting methods. This paper adds fuel to this debate by comparing the performance of alternative specifications for modelin...

This paper studies the business cycle in Germany using the HP-filter (Hodrick/Prescott (1997)) to isolate the cyclical component. A two-country International Business Cycle model in line with Baxter/Crucini (1995) is built to explain these facts. The combination of GHH-preferences with taste shocks resulting from government consumption is shown to be an important feature of the German business ...

Article history: Received 11 October 2012 Received in revised form 3 November 2014 Accepted 3 November 2014 Available online 11 November 2014 In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. While t...

We investigate non-linearities in the stock return trading volume relationship by using daily data for 16 European countries in an asymmetric vector autoregressive model. In this framework, we test for asymmetries and analyze the dynamic relationship using a simulation based procedure for computing asymmetric impulse response functions. We find that stock returns have a significant influence on...

We model the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns as a latent vector autoregressive (VAR) process to study the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between expected returns and risk in a flexible statistical framework and without relying on exogenous predictors. We find a strong and robust negative correlation between the innovations to the conditional moments that leads t...