This paper investigates the empirical relevance of structural breaks in forecasting stock return volatility using both in-sample and out-of-sample tests applied to daily returns of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) All Share Index from 07/02/1995 to 08/25/2010. We find evidence of structural...

The objective of this paper is to examine the government revenue and expenditure relationship in the context of what is known as the soft and hard budget constraint strategy. We adopt a nonlinear framework with structural breaks and focus our empirical analysis in three countries. Two of them...

This article provides new empirical evidence on the long-term relationship between the fiscal and current account imbalances, of five European economies under financial market pressure and insolvency; Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. We attempt to re-evaluate the dynamic linkages...

This study examines the short- and the long-run relationship between electricity demand and its determinants in the Iranian residential sector. The study employs unit root tests, cointegration and error-correction models on annual time series for the period, 1967–2009. The results show that...

Intraday data of 26 German stocks are used to investigate whether the information contained in trading volume and number of trades as well as in various specifications of overnight returns can improve one-step-ahead volatility forecasts. For this purpose, a HAR model of the realized range...

In this paper, we evaluate the role of using consumer price index (CPI) disaggregated data to improve the accuracy of inflation forecasts. Our forecasting approach is based on extracting the factors from the subcomponents of the CPI at the highest degree of disaggregation. The data set contains...

In this paper, we examine the predictive ability, both in-sample and the out-of-sample, for South African stock returns using a number of financial variables, based on monthly data with an in-sample period covering 1990:01 to 1996:12 and the out-of-sample period of 1997:01 to 2010:04. We use the...

We examine both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability of South African stock return using macroeconomic variables. We base our analysis on a predictive regression framework, using monthly data covering the in-sample period between 1990:01 and 1996:12, and the out-of sample period commencing...

Monetary integration, and more specifically, the creation of a monetary union in Europe, raises new economic questions concerning its functioning and governance. In particular, we focus on the implications of high and persistent current account deficits for the economic performance of monetary...

This paper proposes the implementation of the SupWald test of Andrews (1993) to detect structural breaks in the loadings of a static factor model. The procedure is illustrated by testing for structural breaks in the common factors of GDP growth series for a sample of advanced countries from 1950...