Abstract Forecast improvements can be expected if the two partners involved in a brokerage merger pool information and expertise. We examine four large mergers of brokerage firms in the last decade to study the incidence of and explanations for forecast improvements after the mergers. At the...

Abstract This paper proposes two methods for estimating panel data models with group specific parameters when group membership is not known. The first method uses the individual level time series estimates of the parameters to form threshold variables. The problem of parameter heterogeneity is...

Practitioners often have at their disposal a large number of instruments that are weakly exogenous for the parameter of interest. However, not every instrument has the same predictive power for the endogenous variable, and using too many instruments can induce bias. We consider two ways of...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty. Our estimates display significant independent variations from popular uncertainty proxies, suggesting that much of the variation in the proxies is not driven by...