Im Zentrum dieser Dissertation steht das Beschreiben und Erklären von Konjunkturdynamiken. Motiviert durch den außerordentlich starken wirtschaftlichen Einbruch in 2008/2009 betont die Arbeit dabei die Wichtigkeit der Nutzung von nichtlinearen Modellansätzen. Die Dissertation kann als Beitrag...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to enormous data movements that strongly affect parameters and forecasts from standard VARs. To address these issues, we propose VAR models with outlier-augmented stochastic volatility (SV) that combine transitory and persistent changes in volatility. The resulting...

This paper considers an institutional investor who is implementing a long-term portfolio allocation strategy using forecasts of financial returns. We compare the performance of two competing macro-finance models, an unrestricted Vector AutoRegression (VAR) and a fully structural Dynamic...

This paper investigates the predictive properties of import and export prices of commodities on the exchange rates. A period from 1993 to 2016 is considered. We find that forecasts of the exchange rate adding commodity export and import prices are superior to those neglecting these variables....

We propose a new algorithm which allows easy estimation of Vector Autoregressions (VARs) featuring asymmetric priors and time varying volatilities, even when the cross sectional dimension of the system N is particularly large. The algorithm is based on a simple triangularisation which allows to...

This paper investigates the ability of several generalized Bayesian vector autoregressions to cope with the extreme COVID-19 observations and discusses their impact on prior calibration for inference and forecasting purposes. It shows that the preferred model interprets the pandemic episode as a...

We propose a new variational approximation of the joint posterior distribution of the log-volatility in the context of large Bayesian VARs. In contrast to existing approaches that are based on local approximations, the new proposal provides a global approximation that takes into account the...