[Update: Within four weeks of the original publication of this research report, Risk Magazine reported in its 28th February 2012 issue story titled 'Goodbye VaR? Basel to Consider Other Risk Metrics': "A review of trading book capital rules, due to be launched in March by the Basel Committee on...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

Motivated by previous studies documenting significant return and volatility effects of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the stock market, this study examines whether EPU has an effect on the dynamic conditional correlations between stock and commodity returns. Our findings point to a...

We show that a business-cycle component of consumption growth (dubbed business-cycle consumption) with cycles between 2 and 4 years is effective in explaining the differences in risk premia across alternative test assets, including recently-proposed anomaly portfolios. We formalize the mapping...

This paper tackles a core question of portfolio management: How ‘active' is an active portfolio? To answer this question holistically, we generalise the idea of Active Share by keeping the same calculation methodology but substituting in different types of portfolio and benchmark ‘weights'....

One of the most popular measures of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is an index based on newspapers coverage of particular keywords. The constructed index is often then included in VAR models to examine the extent to which EPU affects economic activity. Researchers, however, have not...

We propose a new measure of underlying inflation that informs, in real time, about asymmetric risks on the outlook of inflationary pressures. The asymmetries are generated through nonlinearities induced by economic activity. The new indicator is based on a multivariate regime-switching framework...

We propose a Markov Switching Graphical Seemingly Unrelated Regression (MS-GSUR) model to investigate time-varying systemic risk based on a range of multi-factor asset pricing models. Methodologically, we develop a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme in which latent states are identified on...

We investigate whether the United States economy responds negatively to oil price uncertainty and whether oil price shocks exert asymmetric effects on economic activity. In doing so, we relax the assumption in the existing literature that the data are governed by a single process, modifying the...