The asset allocation decision is often considered as a trade-off between maximizing the expected return of a portfolio and minimizing the portfolio risk. The riskiness is evaluated in terms of variance of the portfolio return, so that it is fundamental to consider correctly the variance of its...

The transmission mechanisms of volatility between markets can be characterized within a new Markov Switching bivariate model where the state of one variable feeds into the transition probability of the state of the other. A number of model restrictions and hypotheses can be tested to stress the...