This paper examines the out‐of‐sample forecast performance of sectoral stock market indicators for real GDP, private consumption and investment growth up to 4 quarters ahead in the US and the Euro Area. Our findings are that the predictive content of sectoral stock market indicators: i) is...

This paper evaluates how well sectoral stock prices forecast future economic activity compared to traditional predictors such as the term spread, dividend yield, exchange rates and money growth. The study is applied to euro area financial asset prices and real economic growth, covering the...

In this paper we compare the in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance of no-arbitrage quadratic and essentially affine term structure models, as well as the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model. In total eleven model variants are evaluated, comprising five quadratic, four affine and two...

This paper investigates the market pricing of subprime mortgage risk on the basis of data for the ABX.HE family of indices, which have become a key barometer of mortgage market conditions during the recent financial crisis. After an introduction into ABX index mechanics and a discussion of...

We propose a new model of trading in OTC markets. Dealers accumulate inventories by trading with end-investors and trade among each other to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers use a more efficient trading technology than peripheral dealers, who are heterogeneously connected to...

We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who "learn from experience." Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...

Market participants often invest in order to acquire information that pertains to the market itself (e.g. order flow) rather than to fundamentals. This enables them to infer more information from past trades. I show that agents trading on such information, typically high-frequency traders,...

We examine empirically the role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) in price discovery and price efficiency. Based on our methodology, we find overall that HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing...

In this paper we examine the quantitative effects of margin regulation on volatility in asset markets. We consider a general equilibrium infinite-horizon economy with heterogeneous agents and collateral constraints. There are two assets in the economy which can be used as collateral for...

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500; options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then...