The aim of this thesis is to thoroughly study structural default models based on jump-diffusion processes. Jump-diffusion models were first proposed by Zhou (2001), who also showed that these models have several desirable properties, most important, positive short-term spreads. On the other...

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2011. Major: Business Administration. Advisor: Robert S. Goldstein. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 117 pages, appendices p. 110-117.

This dissertation contains three applications of time series in finance and macroeconomics. The first essay compares the cumulative returns for stocks and bonds atinvestment horizons from one to ten years by using a test for spatial dominance.Spatial dominance is a variation of stochastic...

The present dissertation consists of three stand-alone research papers that all deal with factor models from a Bayesian perspective, both in a theoretical and an empirical setup. More precisely, the thesis is organized in a progressive way as follows: Chapter 1 briefly presents the general...

Bayesian nonparametric methods are useful for modeling data without having to define the complexity of the entire model a priori, but rather allowing for this complexity to be determined by the data. Two problems considered in this dissertation are the number of components in a mixture model,...

The research presented in this thesis addresses different aspects of dynamic portfolio construction and portfolio risk measurement. It brings the research on dynamic portfolio optimization, replicating portfolio construction, dynamic portfolio risk measurement and volatility forecast together....

GARCH models are commonly used as latent processes in econometrics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Yet no exact likelihood analysis of these models has been provided so far. In this paper we outline the issues and suggest a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm which allows the...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...