Available online 10 June 2014 This paper analyzes the volatility linkage across the U.S., European, German, Japanese, and Swiss equity markets from 1999 to 2009. Both the unconditional and conditional correlations exhibit large fluctuations during the sample period. The results from the VAR analysis show an asymmetric two-way relation between the VIX and other market volatility indices, in whic...

Within the approaches that have been applied to assess the impact of public capital on economic growth, this paper estimates the dynamic effects of public infrastructures using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) methodology for the Spanish regions. From a methodological point of view, our work contains different innovative features with respect to the previous studies using VAR models. T...

The identification of a VAR requires differentiating between correlation and causation. This paper presents a method to deal with this problem. Graphical models, which provide a rigorous language to analyze the statistical and logical properties of causal relations, associate a particular set of vanishing partial correlations to every possible causal structure. The structural form is described ...

In this paper we analyze asset returns models with diffusion part and jumps in returns with stochastic volatility either from diffusion or pure jump part. We consider different specifications for the pure jump part including compound Poisson, Variance Gamma and Levy α-stable jumps. Monte Carlo Markov chain algorithm is constructed to estimate models with latent Variance Gamma and Levy α−stable ...

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...

In this paper, we examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds using Value-at-Risk (VaR) as the criterion for measuring risk and estimating capital requirements. We find that a vast majority of hedge funds are adequately capitalized, with the level of under-capitalization being only 3.1% for live funds and 7.5% for dead funds. Using extreme value theory, we confirm that ...

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 ...

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...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading, countercyclical correlation of spreads with output when shocks arising from the credit market contribute to ou...