This paper merges the literature on technical trading rules with the literature on Markov switching to develop economically useful trading rules. The Markov models' out-of sample, excess returns modestly exceed those of standard technical rules and are profitable over the most recent subsample....

Business recessions are notoriously hard to predict accurately, hence the quip that economists have predicted eight of the last five recessions. This article derives a six-month-ahead recession signal that reduces the number of false signals outside of recession, without impairing the ability to...

One criticism of VAR forecasting is that macroeconomic variables tend not to behave as linear functions of their own past around business cycle turning points. This article investigates the methods and efficacy of forecasting with a VAR that expands the information set to include dynamic...

This article presents a new Qual VAR model for incorporating information from qualitative and/or discrete variables in vector autoregressions. With a Qual VAR, it is possible to create dynamic forecasts of the qualitative variable using standard VAR projections. Previous forecasting methods for...

This paper proposes a contemporaneous smooth transition threshold autoregressive model (C-STAR) as a modification of the smooth transition threshold autoregressive model surveyed in Teräsvirta (1998), in which the regime weights depend on the ex ante probability that a latent regime-specific...

Past experience has led financial market participants to believe that future interest rates will be closely related to the performance of the economy. If so, the shape of the yield curve ought to summarize the implicit economic forecasts of a broad range of bond traders. Previous research has...

This paper proposes a contemporaneous smooth transition threshold autoregressive model (C-STAR) as a modification of the smooth transition threshold autoregressive model surveyed in Teräsvirta (1998), in which the regime weights depend on the ex ante probability that a latent regime-specific...

This paper proposes a contemporaneous smooth transition threshold autoregressive model (C-STAR) as a modification of the smooth transition threshold autoregressive model surveyed in Teräsvirta (1998), in which the regime weights depend on the ex ante probability that a latent regime-specific...

This paper argues that inferring long-horizon asset-return predictability from the properties of vector autoregressive (VAR) models on relatively short spans of data is potentially unreliable. We illustrate the problems that can arise by re-examining the findings of Bekaert and Hodrick (1992),...