Using a nonlinear structural VAR approach, we estimate the effects of exogenous monetary impulses in the presence of a zero lower bound constraint on nominal interest rates and examine the impact of such a constraint on the effectiveness of counter-cyclical monetary policies. We find that a binding zero bound on nominal interest rates can eliminate more than 50% of the effect of an exogenous mo...

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...

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...

Article history: Received 20 June 2014 Received in revised form 25 September 2014 Accepted 26 September 2014 Available online 5 October 2014 This paper investigates the time-varying impact of oil price uncertainty on stock prices in China using weekly data on ten sectoral indices over the period January 1997–February 2014. The estimation of a bivariate VAR-GARCH-in-mean model suggests that oil ...

Article history: Received 17 September 2014 Received in revised form 23 March 2015 Accepted 24 March 2015 Available online 31 March 2015 This paper investigates the dynamic effects of common macroeconomic shocks in shaping business cycle fluctuations in a group of Euro-area countries. In particular, by using the structural (near) VAR methodology, we investigate the effect of area-wide shocks, w...

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 ...

This paper complements existing cross-section and panel data analyses of the interaction of income and health outcomes by applying a cointegrating VAR model of income and health to time-series data for several Scandinavian countries. The results are consistent with previous crosssection and panel results, but also highlight the complexity and heterogeneity of the dynamic relationships that gene...

The accession of several Central and Eastern European Countries to Euroland is likely to be realised within the next years. Some studies aim at analysing the suitability of these Euro aspirants for currency union with EMU by evaluating the related macroeconomic costs. Still, they are prone to the Lucas critique since they do not consider endogeneity of the relevant criteria. We build on methodo...

This paper focuses on portfolio risk forecasting in an asymmetrical framework. Risk is defined by two factors; the dependence structure and the volatility. In order to account for asymmetric dependencies, the return series’ interdependence is estimated via a Copula approach rather than the correlation matrix. This allows to capture tightening dependence during market turmoils and loose dependen...

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 ...