We consider the dynamic factor model and show how smoothness restrictions can be imposed on the factor loadings. Cubic spline functions are used to introduce smoothness in factor loadings. We develop statistical procedures based on Wald, Lagrange multiplier and likelihood ratio tests for this...

This paper introduces regime switching into level-ARCH models for the short rates of the US, the UK, and Germany. Once regime switching and level effects are included there are no gains from including ARCH effects. It is of secondary importance how the regime switching is specified. The...

This paper presents a dynamic factor model in which the extracted factors and shocks are given a clear economic interpretation. The economic interpretation of the factors is obtained by means of a set of over-identifying loading restrictions, while the structural shocks are estimated following...

Economy-wide effects of shocks to the US federal funds rate are estimated in a state space model with 120 US macroeconomic and financial time series driven by the dynamics of the federal funds rate and a few dynamic factors. This state space system is denoted a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) by...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero.We...

Declining inflation persistence has been documented in numerous studies. When such series are analyzed in a regression framework in conjunction with other persistent time series, spurious regressions are likely to occur. We propose to use the coefficient of determination R2 as a test statistic...

We give an overview of a broad class of models designed to capture stochastic volatility in financial markets, with illustrations of the scope of application of these models to practical finance problems. In a broad sense, this model class includes GARCH, but we focus on a narrower set of...

Starting from the discrete-time affine term structure model by Dai, Le & Singleton (2006), this paper proposes a Radon-Nikodym derivative which implies that factors follow a mixture distribution under the physical measure. The model thus maintains attractive features of an affine relation...

Based on individual expectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we construct a realtime proxy for expected term premium changes on long-term bonds. We empirically investigate the relation of these bond term premium expectations with expectations about key macroeconomic variables as...

In this paper we extend the CKLS one factor short rate model to include extreme value nonlinear mean reversion. Similarly to a recent stock market study, we include the smallest short rate during the previous year in the mean equation. We investigate the US and five other major markets (Canada,...