The random walk is often used to model exchange rates. According to the Lucas critique, however, policy shifts may lead to breaks in the trend of exchange rates and hence to long swings. We use a Markov regime-switching model to allow for such swings and we reject the random walk in favor of the...

In early 2018 Bitcoin prices peaked at USD 20,000 and, almost two years later, we still continue debating if cryptocurrencies can actually become a currency for the everyday life or not. From the economic point of view, and playing in the field of behavioral finance, this paper analyses the...

This paper shows that combinations of option implied and time series volatility forecasts that are conditional on current information are statistically superior to individual models, (unconditional) combinations, and hybrid forecasts. Hence, it finds empirical evidence that both, combining...

Strongly periodic series occur frequently in many disciplines. This paper reviews one specific approach to analyzing such series viz. the harmonic regression approach. In this paper the five major methods suggested under this approach are critically reviewed and compared, and their empirical...

In the context of the Bank of Albania’s primary objective of achieving and maintaining price stability, generating accurate and reliable forecasts for the future rate of inflation is a necessity for its successful realization. This paper aims to enrich the Bank's portfolio of short-term...

This paper proposes two consistent model selection procedures for factor-augmented regressions in finite samples. We first demonstrate that the usual cross-validation is inconsistent, but that a generalization, leave-d-out cross-validation, selects the smallest basis for the space spanned by the...