This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

Notwithstanding a resurgence in research on out-of-sample forecasts of the price of oil in recent years, there is one important approach to forecasting the real price of oil which has not been studied systematically to date. This approach is based on the premise that demand for crude oil derives...

Default rates are series commonly used in stress testing. In Canada, as in many other countries, there are no historical series available for sectoral default rates on bank loans to firms. Knowledge of such data is required to assess the impact of shocks on the balance sheets of financial...

Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China’s gradual process of interest rate liberalization. This paper investigates the main...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify, and not particularly successful when compared with naïve...

Observed high-frequency prices are contaminated with liquidity costs or market microstructure noise. Using such data, we derive a new asset return variance estimator inspired by the market microstructure literature to explicitly model the noise and remove it from observed returns before...

This paper addresses an existing gap in the developing literature on conditional skewness. We develop a simple procedure to evaluate parametric conditional skewness models. This procedure is based on regressing the realized skewness measures on model-implied conditional skewness values. We find...

In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

This paper proposes a novel regression-based approach to the estimation of Gaussian dynamic term structure models that avoids numerical optimization. This new estimator is an asymptotic least squares estimator defined by the no-arbitrage conditions upon which these models are built. We discuss...

A longstanding finding in the forecasting literature is that averaging forecasts from different models often improves upon forecasts based on a single model, with equal weight averaging working particularly well. This paper analyzes the effects of trimming the set of models prior to averaging....