This paper investigates the spurious effect in forecasting asset returns when signals from technical trading rules are used as predictors. Against economic intuition, the simulation result shows that, even if past information has no predictive power, buy or sell signals based on the difference...

Is there asymmetry in the distribution of government bond returns in developed countries? Can asymmetries be predicted using financial and macroeconomic variables? To answer the first question, we provide evidence for asymmetry in government bond returns in particular for short maturities. This...

In this note, I consider a general class of unobserved components (UC) models and derive a relevant inequality. This inequality implies that either of the two assumptions of standard UC models, namely, a random walk trend and uncorrelated shocks, is not satisfied if the impulse response measure...

In this article, we develop the asymptotic theory of Hwang and Basawa (2005) for explosive random coefficient autoregressive (ERCA) models. Applying the theory, we prove that a locally best invariant (LBI) test in McCabe and Tremayne (1995), which is for the null of a unit root (UR) process...

Japan has experienced turbulent behavior of land prices after World War II, especially after 1985. This paper first examines the explanatory power of a simple present-value model and shows its limitation. We then investigate two additional (not mutually exclusive) factors affecting the Japanese...

This article examines the relation between price volatility, trading volume and open interest for the Nikkei 225 stock index futures traded on the Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) using the method developed by Bessembinder and Seguin (1993). The OSE regulation for trading of the Nikkei 225...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the powerful and flexible applicability of the Gram-Charlier expansion to pricing of a wide variety of interest rate related products involving interest rate risk and credit risk. In this paper, we develop easily implemented approximations of the...

This paper analyzes the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model for the Japanese economy and monetary policy. The parameters are allowed to follow a random walk process and estimated using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. The empirical result reveals the time-varying...

This article evaluates the predictive performance of variance risk premiums (VRPs) in Japan on the Nikkei 225 returns, credit spreads, and the composite index of coincident indicators. Different monthly VRPs, such as expected and ex-post VRPs, are measured by using model-free implied and...