"Come and Hope with Me!" This was the rallying call by South African Mongane Serote to draw the world's attention to the battle fought by his people against Apartheid. It is in this spirit that we invite readers to explore this special edition of Policy in Focus. This issue is dedicated to the...

The increase in inequality over the last few decades in most of the world has been a constant source of concern for policymakers and analysts. Inequality can hinder economic growth, reduce well-being and increase poverty. It also fuels social unrest and reduces social cohesion. Great attention...

Even though substantial progress has been achieved worldwide in reducing both poverty and malnutrition, much is yet to be done. There are signs that the progress made in both dimensions has stalled in recent years. This special issue of Policy in Focus is dedicated to answering a crucial...

Many studies have shown that wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality and has increased in recent decades. This issue of Policy in Focus is dedicated to wealth taxes, presenting various perspectives on whether they can be an effective instrument for distributive and fiscal...

This article shows that bagging can improve the forecast accuracy of time series models for realized volatility. We consider 23 stocks from the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the sample period 1995 to 2005 and employ two different forecast models, a log-linear specification in the spirit of...

Statistical Learning refers to statistical aspects of automated extraction of regularities (structure) in datasets. It is a broad area which includes neural networks, regression-trees, nonparametric statistics and sieve approximation, boosting, mixtures of models, computational complexity,...

A model of realized variance-covariance is proposed using a portfolio with the most liquid stockassets of Ibovespa. The purpose is to evaluate the economic gains associated with following avolatility timing strategy based on the model’s conditional forecasts. Comparing with...

The estimation of the impact of macroeconomic announcements in the Brazilian futuresmarkets is used to uncover the relationship between macroeconomic fundamentals andasset prices. Using intraday data from October 2008 to January 2011, we find thatexternal macroeconomic announcements dominate...

Brazilian Foreign Exchange (FX) markets have a unique structure: most trades are conducted in the derivatives (futures) market. We study price discovery in the FX markets in Brazil and indicate which market (spot or futures) adjusts more quickly to the arrival of new information. We find that...

This article reviews the exciting and rapidly expanding literature on realized volatility. After presenting a general univariate framework for estimating realized volatilities, a simple discrete time model is presented in order to motivate the main results. A continuous time specification...