Early warning systems (EWSs) are subject to restrictions that apply to exchange rates in general: fundamentals matter but their influence is small and unstable. Despite this limitation four major lessons emerge: First, EWSs have robust forecasting power and thus help policy-makers to prevent crises. Second, policy-makers must decide about some EWSs' elements, such as the sensitivity of the fore...

We provide a comprehensive study of out-of-sample forecasts for the EUR/USD exchange rate based on multivariate macroeconomic models and forecast combinations. We use profit maximization measures based on directional accuracy and trading strategies in addition to standard loss minimization measures. When comparing predictive accuracy and profit measures, data snooping bias free tests are used. ...

Over the past two decades, financial market crises with similar features have occurred in different regions of the world. Unstable cross-market linkages during a crisis are referred to as financial contagion. We simulate crisis transmission in the context of a model of market participants adopting various strategies; this allows testing for financial contagion under alternative scenarios. Using...

This paper provides new evidence on the dynamics of equity risk premia in euro area stock markets across country and industry portfolios. We develop and estimate a conditional intertemporal CAPM where returns on aggregate euro area, country and industry portfolios depend on the market risk as well as on the risk that the investment opportunity set changes over time. Prices of risks are time-var...

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...

The smooth threshold autoregressive (STAR) model is by far the most successful model in explaining the well-known two PPP puzzles. The nonlinearity in STAR captures the nature of vast transaction costs in trade, sunk costs in (foreign) investment, and hetergeneity in agents. In this paper, we use a variant of STAR, the Exponential STAR (ESTAR), to study the exchange rate dynamics in China durin...

It is well known that strategies that allow investors to allocate their wealth using return and volatility forecasts, the use of which are termed market and volatility timing, are of significant value. In this paper, we show that distribution tim ing, defined here as the ability to use forecasts for moments up to the fourth one, yields significant incremental economic value. By considering the ...

A practice that has become widespread is that of comparing forecasts of financial return variability obtained from discrete time models against high frequency estimates based on continuous time theory. In explanatory financial return variability modelling this raises several methodological and practical issues, which suggests an alternative framework is needed. The contribution of this study is...

Micro…nance is typically associated with joint liability of group members. However, a large part of micro…nance institutions rather o¤ers individual instead of group loans. We analyze the incentive mechanisms in both individual and group contracts. Moreover, we show that micro…nance institutions o¤er group loans when the loan size is rather large, re…nancing costs are high, and competition betw...