We show that including financial market data at daily frequency, along with macro series at standard lower frequency, facilitates statistical inference on structural parameters in dynamic equilibrium models. Our continuous-time formulation conveniently accounts for the difference in observation...

The implied volatility surface is the collection of volatilities implied by option contracts for different strike prices and time-to-maturity. We study factor models to capture the dynamics of this three-dimensional implied volatility surface. Three model types are considered to examine...

We consider the dynamic factor model and show how smoothness restrictions can be imposed on the factor loadings. Cubic spline functions are used to introduce smoothness in factor loadings. We develop statistical procedures based on Wald, Lagrange multiplier and likelihood ratio tests for this...

We study the impact of private information on volatility. We develop a comprehensive framework to investigate this link while controlling for the effects of both public information (such as macroeconomic news releases) and private information on prices and the effect of public information on...

We develop a new empirical approach to term structure analysis that allows testing for time-varying risk premia and for the absence of arbitrage opportunities based on the drift restriction within the Heath, Jarrow and Morton (1992) framework. As in the equity case, a zero intercept condition is...

It is common practice to estimate the volatility-growth link by specifying a standard growth equation such that the variance of the error term appears as an explanatory variable in this growth equation. The variance in turn is modelled by a second equation. Hardly any of existing applications of...

This paper shows that the consumption-based asset pricing model (C-CAPM) with low-probability disaster risk rationalizes large pricing errors, i.e. Euler equation errors. This result is remarkable, since Lettau and Ludvigson (2009) show that leading asset pricing models cannot explain sizeable...

Understanding the process of economic growth involves comparing competing theoretical models and evaluating their empirical relevance. Our approach is to take the neoclassical stochastic growth model directly to the data and make inferences about the model parameters of interest. In this paper,...

This paper shows that non-linearities can generate time-varying and asymmetric risk premia over the business cycle. These (empirical) key features become relevant and asset market implications improve substantially when we allow for non-normalities in the form of rare disasters. We employ...

This paper studies the effects of taxation on output volatility in OECD countries to shed light on the sources of observed heterogeneity over time and across countries. To this end, we derive tax effects on macro aggregates in a stochastic neoclassical model. As a result, taxes are shown to...