In this paper the long-run trend in CPI in‡ation (core in‡ation) for Italy is estimated over the 1962-1997 period within the framework of a multivariate common trends model. In this framework core in‡ation is directly linked to money and wage growth and interpreted as the long-run forecast of in‡ation. This measure displays several desirable properties: lower variability than observed in‡ation,...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the success of the Litterman prior in VAR forecasting is not due to the realism of the prior, but rather because the prior conveniently reduces forecast error variance in common cases of misspecification. Specifically, it is shown that the imposition of a random walk prior reduces forecast error variance in misspecifications involving (1) time-va...

Any announcement from the Federal Reserve has a huge impact on the interest rate markets. The press releases from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) are major inputs to the market and the random intervention model is applied to interest rate futures transaction data to measure FOMC announcement impact. Missing prices during non-trading time periods are imputed iteratively during the estim...

The paper deals with Alternative Risk Transfer (ART) through securitization of longevity and mortality risks in pension plans and commercial life insurance. Various types of such mortality-linked securities are described including methods of their pricing and real examples (e.g. CATM bonds, longevity bonds, mortality forwards and futures, mortality swaps, and others). Hypothetical calculations ...

This paper investigates forecasts of US in#ation at the 12-month horizon. The starting point is the conventional unemployment rate Phillips curve, which is examined in a simulated out-of-sample forecasting framework. In#ation forecasts produced by the Phillips curve generally have been more accurate than forecasts based on other macroeconomic variables, including interest rates, money and commo...

A semiparametric extension of the GJR model (Glosten et al., 1993. Journal of Finance 48, 1779–1801) is proposed for the volatility of foreign exchange returns. Under reasonable assumptions, asymptotic normal distributions are established for the estimators of the model, corroborated by simulation results. When applied to the Deutsche Mark/US Dollar and the Deutsche Mark/British Pound daily ret...

This paper argues that the existence of bank networks is important for banks ́ reaction to monetary policy. For the example of Germany, the VAR analysis shows that following a monetary contraction small banks access the interbank market indirectly through the head institutions of their respective network organisations. The interbank flows within these networks allow small banks to access funds t...

I investigate cointegrating relationships such that, even though the long-run attractors are assumed to be linear, the dynamics of the equilibrium errors depends on the business cycle. I postulate a Markov-switching common stochastic trends model to study both the short-run responses to permanent shocks and the e/ects of recessions in the long-run growth. I apply these 0ndings to explore the sh...

Many economic applications call for simultaneous equations VAR modeling. We show that the existing importance sampler can be prohibitively inefficient for this type of models. We develop a Gibbs simulator that works for both simultaneous and recursive VAR models with a much broader range of linear restrictions than those in the existing literature. We show that the required computation is of an...

This paper establishes analytically what the asymptotic behavior of the DickeyFuller coefficient tests and the Dickey-Fuller t-statistic tests will be when the true data-generating process is a trigonometric function of an integrated process. Using some recently established limit theorems, it is shown that for such a data generating process, the asymptotic behavior of these unit root tests is r...