I describe a tractable way to study macroeconomic quantities and asset prices in a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The proposed approximate solution is analytical, log-linear, and adjusted for risk. Therefore, it is well suited to investigate economic mechanisms,...

Do sector-specific factors common to all countries play an important role in explaining business cycle co-movement? We address this question by analyzing international co-movements of value added (VA) growth in a multi-sector dynamic factor model. The model contains a world factor,...

Are exogenous shocks to lending spreads in corporate credit markets a substantial source of macroeconomic fluctuations? An alternative explanation of the data is that borrowing costs respond endogenously to expectations of future default, driven by macroeconomic shocks. We investigate by...

From the macroeconomist's viewpoint, agent based modelling has an obvious drawback: it makes impossible to think in aggregate terms. The modeller, in fact, can reconstruct aggregate variables only “from the bottom up” by summing the levels of a myriad of individual variables. We propose a...

We appreciate the thorough review and very useful comments of Cheng, Ibraimi, Leippold, and Zhang. The suggestions have helped significantly to improve our original approximation formula and lead us to provide an exact solution under the Lin and Chang (2010) framework and we thank the editor to...

Volatility swaps and volatility options are financial products written on discretely sampled realized variance. Actively traded in over-the-counter markets, these products are often priced by continuously sampled approximations to simplify the computations. This paper presents an analytical...

This paper examines the impact of allowing for stochastic volatility and jumps (SVJ) in a structural model on corporate credit risk prediction. The results from a simulation study verify the better performance of the SVJ model compared with the commonly used Merton model, and three sources are...

We derive semi-analytic solutions for power option prices under the Heston model; specifically, the pricing formula is shown to be valid whenever the power of the underlying asset price has a finite moment. Unlike the majority of stochastic volatility models, there remains a significant problem...

The recent theoretical asset allocation literature has derived optimal dynamic investment strategies in various advanced models of asset returns. But how sensitive is investor welfare to deviations from the theoretically optimal strategy? Will unsophisticated investors do almost as well as...

The existing evidence for exporters׳ entry and exit in response to exchange rate movements is based on either low frequency data or a sample with large devaluations. Using quarterly data of U.S. bilateral trade with 99 countries, this study provides new evidence that the extensive margin of...