The popular scholarly exercise of evaluating exchange rate forecasting models relative to a random walk was stimulated by the well-cited Meese and Rogoff (1983) paper. Practitioners who construct quantitative models for trading exchange rates approach forecasting from a different perspective....

This paper deals with the economics of Bitcoins in two ways. First, it broadens the discussion on how to capture Bitcoins using economic terms. Center stage in this analysis take the discussion of some unique characteristics of this market as well as the comparison of Bitcoins and gold. Second,...

This paper deals with three aspects of spectacular oil price episodes such as the one witnessed in 2008. First, the concept of temporary explosiveness is proposed as an empirical method for capturing this type of behavior. The application of a recently proposed recursive unit root test shows...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...

It has been forty years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged....

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of a high-frequency financial time series dataset. It focuses on temporal aggregation and other features of the data, and how they might affect the degree of dependence of the series. Fractional integration or I(d) models are estimated with a...