This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

In recent years the issue of life expectancy has become of upmost importance to pension providers, insurance companies and the government bodies in the developed world. Significant and consistent improvements in mortality rates and hence life expectancy have led to unprecedented increases in the...

Predicting life expectancy has become of upmost importance in society. Pension providers, insurance companies, government bodies and individuals in the developed world have a vested interest in understanding how long people will live for. This desire to better understand life expectancy has...

The area of mortality modelling has received significant attention over the last 25 years owing to the need to quantify and forecast improving mortality rates. This need is driven primarily by the concern of governments, insurance and actuarial professionals and individuals to be able to fund...

This paper investigates sensitivity of the VaR models when return series of stocks and stock indices are not normally distributed. It also studies the effect of market capitalization of stocks and stock indices on their Value at risk and Conditional VaR estimation. Three different market...

An artificial neural network (hence after, ANN) is an information processing paradigm that is inspired by the way biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. In previous two decades, ANN applications in economics and finance; for such tasks as pattern reorganization, and...

Contrary to their significance for the adjustment of econometric models, dummy variables are seldom addressed in the literature. They serve as a tool for improving the fit of the model equations to the data and with it the prognostic performance of a model, at least lastly. Referring to the...

The Department of Finance employs extensively a large macroeconomic model of the Canadian economy -- the QFS model(Quarterly Forecasting and Simulation Model) -- for economic and fiscal forecasting and simulation exercises. As with any large macroeconomic model, and particularly one that plays a...

Though a large number of structural macroeconometric models have been estimated for India, the fact that all these are based on annual data limit their usefulness for short-term policy analysis, particularly in volatile periods of the type seen during last few quarters. Therefore the present...

Macroeconomic practitioners frequently work with multivariate time series models such as VARs, factor augmented VARs as well as time-varying parameter versions of these models (including variants with multivariate stochastic volatility). These models have a large number of parameters and, thus,...