This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Applied Financial Economics', 2011, 21, 95-116.<P> This paper documents the existence of large structural breaks in the unconditional correlations among the British pound, Norwegian krone, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, and euro exchange rates...</p>

We propose a new approach to deal with structural breaks in time series models. The key contribution is an alternative dynamic stochastic specification for the model parameters which describes potential breaks. After a break new parameter values are generated from a so-called baseline prior...

We develop a new parameter stability test against the alternative of observation driven generalized autoregressive score dynamics. The new test generalizes the ARCH-LM test of Engle (1982) to settings beyond time-varying volatility and exploits any autocorrelation in the likelihood scores under...

It is generally believed that for the power of unit root tests, only the time span and not the observation frequency matters. In this paper we show that the observation frequency does matter when the high-frequency data display fat tails and volatility clustering, as is typically the case for...

The stability of the demand for real Ml in Indonesia is empirically examinedusing quarterly data between 1981 and 2002. A cointegrated VAR methodology thatisolates the period of structural breaks in the data generating process of the variables,caused by the Asian crisis, is used. The results...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) toinvestigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioralassumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating ofbeliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) amongagents. The recently introduced concept of...

We argue that the failure to disentangle the evolution of the Canadian currency from the U.S. currency leads to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding the case of Dutch disease in Canada. We propose a new approach that is aimed at extracting both currency components and energy- and...

While virtually all modern models of exchange rate crises recognise that the decision to abandon an exchange rate peg depends on how harshly policy makers are willing to defend the regime, they virtually never model how the exchange rate is defended. In this paper we incorporate both the...

If there is exchange market pressure (EMP), monetary authorities can use the interest rate and official interventions to offset this depreciation tendency, or they can let the exchange rate change. We introduce a new approach to derive how these three variables should be combined to measure EMP....