The new Basel II regulation contains a number of new regulatory features. Most importantly, internal ratings will be given a central role in the evaluation of the riskiness of bank loans. Another novelty is that retail credit and loans to small and medium-sized enterprises will receive a special...

Counterpart risk rating is at the heart of the banking business. In the new Basel II regulation, internal ratings have been given a central role. Although much research has been done on external ratings, much less is known about banks´ internal ratings. This paper presents new quantitative...

Exponential smooth transition autoregressive (ESTAR) models are widely used in the international finance literature, particularly for the modelling of real exchange rates. We show that the exponential function is ill-suited as a regime weighting function because of two undesirable properties....

Time series subject to parameter shifts of random magnitude and timing are commonly modeled with a change-point approach using Chib's (1998) algorithm to draw the break dates. We outline some advantages of an alternative approach in which breaks come through mixture distributions in state...

Viewed over the whole available history of fiat money in Sweden, high levels of inflation have been present only over a short time span. It is only in the last two decades - the seventies and the eighties - that inflation has been high, at an average of eight percent on an annual basis. Based on...

Macroeconomic research often relies on structural vector autoregressions to uncover empirical regularities. Critics argue the method goes awry due to lag truncation: short lag-lengths imply a poor approximation to DSGE-models. Empirically, short lag-length is deemed necessary as increased...