We provide an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility for economic activity. We consider monthly measures of realized and implied volatility from the stock and bond markets. In a dynamic factor framework, we extract the common long-run component of volatility that is...

We propose a new battery of dynamic specification tests for the joint hypothesis of iid-ness and density function based on the fundamental properties of independent random variables with identical distributions. We introduce a device-the autocontour-whose shape is very sensitive to departures...

We analyze the cyclical dynamics of the Turkish economy and the stock market as well as their interactions. We use hidden Markov models that are robust to parameter instability arising from major shifts in economic policy, which have been typically observed in the Turkish economy. These models...

We provide an empirical analysis of two important phenomena influencing the hedge fund industry—contagion and time variation in risk adjusted return (alpha)—in a flexible unified framework. After accounting for standard hedge fund pricing factors, we quantify the common latent factor in...