Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for financial market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models i.e., models of the time-varying distributions of portfolio returns. Currently, regulators have available three hypothesis-testing...

The market for U.S. Treasury securities operates around-the-clock from the three main trading centers of Tokyo, London, and New York. We examine this market for volatility spillovers using the methodology employed by Engle, Ito, and Lin (1990) for the foreign exchange market. We find meteor...

Foreign exchange rates are examined using cointegration tests over various time periods linked to regime shifts in central bank behavior. The number of cointegrating vectors seems to vary across these regime changes within the foreign exchange market. For example, cointegration is not generally...

Forecasts are of great importance and widely used in economics and finance. Quite simply, good forecasts lead to good decisions. The importance of forecast evaluation and combination techniques follows immediately—forecast users naturally have a keen interest in monitoring and improving...

Many economic and financial time series have been found to exhibit dynamics in variance; that is, the second moment of the time series innovations varies over time. Many possible model specifications are available to capture this phenomena, but to date, the class of models most widely used are...

Beginning in 1998, commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models; i.e., time-series models of the distributions of portfolio returns. Currently, regulators have available three statistical methods for evaluating the...

Many consumers who lack checking accounts are paying relatively high costs to access the nation's payments system. Legislation aimed at opening the system to these unbanked individuals has centered on requiring commercial banks to offer low-cost "lifeline" accounts. But will cost savings alone...

Covariance matrix forecasts of financial asset returns are an important component of current practice in financial risk management. A wide variety of models, ranging from matrices of simple summary measures to covariance matrices implied from option prices, are available for generating such...

Implied volatilities, as derived from option prices, have been shown to be useful in forecasting the subsequently observed volatility of the underlying financial variables. In this paper, we address the question of whether implied correlations, derived from options on the exchange rates in a...

The Federal Reserve System is an important participant in the nation's payments system, which is the infrastructure used for transmitting and settling payments between individuals, firms, and government entities. For example, as reported in the Federal Reserve System's 2004 annual report, the...