We consider how unit root and stationarity tests can be used to study the convergence properties of prices and rates of inflation. Special attention is paid to the issue of whether a mean should be extracted in carrying out unit root and stationarity tests and whether there is an advantage to...

The objective of this paper is to suggest a new predictive system for international trade, based on an unobserved component model. We employ the predictive system developed by Pastor and Stambaugh (2009), which is unlike other conventional predictive regression models. This paper derives an...

We examine the impact of temporal and portfolio aggregation on the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts over a horizon of ten trading days for a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. The VaR forecasts are constructed based on daily, weekly or biweekly...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

[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...

A long criticism on the usefulness of the traditional CAPM model has been raised in the vast literature of arbitrage pricing models that propose several risk factors on firm fundamentals or investigate the stochastic properties of stock returns' distributions, (Fama and French (2004)). However,...

The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

This paper examines the long-run relationship between goods prices and stock prices to understand whether stock market investment can help hedge against inflation in the United States (US) and Canada. This study employed an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration test developed by...

One of the main challenges facing researchers and industry professionals for decades is the successful prediction of asset returns. This paper enriches this endeavor by an in-depth analysis of topological metrics of correlation networks applied to financial forecasting. While academic research...

Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) offer a robust yet intuitive framework to deal with uncertainty and complexity and have been effectively applied to diverse problems across multiple domains. While the majority of work has focused on cross-sectional data, there has been a recent increase of...