Durland and McCurdy (1994) investigated the issue of duration dependence in US business cycle phases using a Markov regime switching approach, introduced by Hamilton (1989) and extended to the case of variable transition parameters by Filardo (1994). In Durland and McCurdy’s model duration...

This article is concerned with evaluating Value-at-Risk estimates. It is well known that using only binary variables, such as whether or not there was an exception, sacrifices too much information. However, most of the specification tests (also called backtests) available in the literature, such...

An extensive literature examines the dynamics of interest rates, with particular attention given to the positive relationship between interest-rate volatility and the level of interest rates—the so-called level effect. This paper examines the interaction between the estimated level effect...

In this paper we study both the level of Value-at-Risk (VaR) disclosure and the accuracy of the disclosed VaR figures for a sample of US and international commercial banks. To measure the level of VaR disclosures, we develop a VaR Disclosure Index that captures many different facets of market...

A pervasive and puzzling feature of banks' Value-at-Risk (VaR) is its abnormally high level, which leads to excessive regulatory capital. A possible explanation for the tendency of commercial banks to overstate their VaR is that they incompletely account for the diversification effect among...

We evaluate techniques for comparing the ability of Markov regime switching (MRS) models to fit underlying regimes of a series of interest. This is particularly important in the business cycle literature where one may be interested in determining whether using leading indicators to allow...

We evaluate the performance of several specification tests for Markov regime-switching time-series models. We consider the Lagrange multiplier (LM) and dynamic specification tests of Hamilton (1996) and Ljung-Box tests based on both the generalized residual and a standard-normal residual...