Surveys show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is the most widely used measure of forecast accuracy in businesses and organizations. It is however, biased: When used to select among competing prediction methods it systematically selects those whose predictions are too low. This is...

VARs are often estimated with Bayesian techniques to cope with model dimensionality. The posterior means define a class of shrinkage estimators, indexed by hyperparameters that determine the relative weight on maximum likelihood estimates and prior means. In a Bayesian setting, it is natural to...

In nonlinear state-space models, sequential learning about the hidden state can proceed by particle filtering when the density of the observation conditional on the state is available analytically (e.g. Gordon et al. 1993). This condition need not hold in complex environments, such as the...

This paper investigates how the ordering of variables affects properties of the time-varying covariance matrix in the Cholesky multivariate stochastic volatility model.It establishes that systematically different dynamic restrictions are imposed whenthe ratio of volatilities is time-varying....

We propose an easy technique to test for time-variation in coefficients and volatilities. Specifically, by using a noncentered parameterization for state space models, we develop a method to directly calculate the relevant Bayes factor using the Savage-Dickey density ratio — thus avoiding the...

This paper proposes an improved estimation and calibration method to a family of GARCH models. The suggested method fixes one parameter such that the unconditional kurtosis of the model matches the sample kurtosis. The method can be used to estimate the model on historical returns, or calibrate...

We investigate price duration variance estimators that have long been neglected in the literature. We show i) how price duration estimators can be used for the estimation and forecasting of the integrated variance of an underlying semi-martingale price process and ii) how they are affected by a)...