Every year the Canadian government makes up a budget for the forthcoming fiscal year. During the budget process, projections are made of expenditures and receipts contingent upon predictions of key macroeconomic variables. Naturally, one expects that the budget deficit or surplus actually...

This paper evaluates the role of various volatility specifications, such as multiple stochastic volatility (SV) factors and jump components, in appropriate modeling of equity return distributions. We use estimation technology that facilitates non-nested model comparisons and use a long data set...

A general class of Markov switching regime time series models is presented that allows one to estimate the nontrivial interdependencies between different types of cycles which make the economy grow at an unsteady rate. The paper further explores results obtained in Ghysels (1991b) suggesting...

This chapter reviews the principal methods used by researchers when forecasting seasonal time series. In addition, the often overlooked implications of forecasting and feedback for seasonal adjustment are discussed. After an introduction in Section 1, Section 2 examines traditional univariate...

Many continuous time term structure of interest rate models assume a factor structure where the drift and volatility functions are affine functions of the state variable process. These models involve very specific parametric choices of factors and functional specifications of the drift and...

This paper studies the ICAPM intertemporal relation between the conditional mean and the conditional variance of the aggregate stock market return. We introduce a new estimator that forecasts monthly variance with past daily squared returns -- the Mixed Data Sampling (or MIDAS) approach. Using...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies — momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns — a...