The last couple of decades has witnessed a growing interest in hedge funds. Academics and practitioners are intrigued by the distinct characteristics of these investment vehicles: hedge funds are flexible with respect to the types of securities they hold and the type of positions they take; they...

A dynamic Tobit model with Time-varying parameters is proposed for the daily reaction function of the Open Market Desk of the US Federal Reserve. Such a model offers a more realistic depiction of the Desk's behavior than those of past contributions in the literature as it allows for both...

I consider the problem of detecting and predicting regime switching behaviour in the context of Indian Stock Market data. First I discuss detection of volatility change points using the LRT and the Binary Segmentation procedure of Vostrikova (1981). The detected volatility changes are correlated...

Have interest rates been held “too low†in relation to the natural rate of interest? Economists have lately begun to worry that the cost of capital may have fallen below the worldwide expected return on capital, thereby causing excessive borrowing and allowing financial imbalances to...

We present a multivariate generalization of the simple markov-switching model. We allow for the introduction of several latent processes that have a simple parametric distribution. The matrix-variate bernoulli distribution yields a flexible yet parsimonious pattern of dependence between the...

In impulse response analysis the construction of intervals for the response at a particular time is a familiar topic. This paper considers the construction of confidence bands for the path of reponses. It investigates the feasibility of procedures based on heuristic optimisation methods for...

This paper examines different multivariate models to evaluate what are the main determinants when doing VaR forecasts for a portfolio of assets. To achieve this goal, we unify past multivariate models by using a general copula framework and we propose many new extensions. We differentiate the...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models have begun to dominate the field of macroeconomic theory and policy making. In this paper, I present the first estimation results of investment expenditure for the french economy, applying the bayesian estimation approach of DSGE models. first, I...

This paper uses an unobserved component model to examine the relative importance of the structural and the persistence approach to unemployment. We derive the NAIRU from a standard imperfect competition model. The price- and wage-setting schedules include a measure for unemployment persistence....

We estimate the approximate nonlinear solution of a small DSGE model using Bayesian methods. Our results, based on euro area data, suggest that this approch delivers sharper inference compared to the estimation of the linearised solution. The nonlinear model can also account for richer economic...