Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number ofhedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selectioncan be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone,using advanced statistical...

Macroeconomic time series often involve a threshold effect in theirARMA representation, and exhibit long memory features. In this paperwe introduce a new class of threshold ARFIMA models to account forthis. The threshold effect is introduced in the autoregressive and/or thefractional integration...

We test for state-dependent bias in the European Central Bank's inflation projections. We show that the ECB tends to underpredict when the observed inflation rate at the time of forecasting is higher than an estimated threshold of 1.8%. The bias is most pronounced at intermediate forecasting...

When evaluating the significance of calendar effects, such as those associated with Monday and January, it is necessary to control for all possible calendar effects to avoid spurious results. The downside of having to control for a large number of possible calendar effects is that it diminish...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate more than one instance of poor bootstrap performance, and to see how available diagnostic techniques can indicate reliably when and how this poor performance can arise. Two particular features that seem to be important to explain bootstrap discrepancy are...

In this paper, we show the first order validity of the block bootstrap in the context of Kolmogorov type conditional distribution tests when there is dynamic misspecification and parameter estimation error. Our approach differs from the literature to date because we construct a bootstrap...

We take as a starting point the existence of a joint distribution implied by different dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, all of which are potentially misspecified. Our objective is to compare "true" joint distributions with ones generated by given DSGEs. This is accomplished...

This paper introduces bootstrap specification tests for diffusion processes. In the one-dimensional case, the proposed test is closest to the non parametric test introduced by Ait-Sahalia (1996), in the sense that both procedures determine whether the drift and variance components of a...

In the conduct of empirical macroeconomic research, unit root, cointegration, common cycle, and related test statistics are often constructed using logged data, even though there is often no clear reason, at least from an empirical perspective, why logs should be used rather than levels....

Mild factor loading instability, particularly if sufficiently independent across the different constituent variables, does not affect the estimation of the number of factors, nor subsequent estimation of the factors themselves (see e.g. Stock and Watson (2009)). This result does not hold in the...