With the current sovereign debt crisis, the incompleteness of economic integration in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has become patent leading to an intense debate among academics and policy makers. Most of the debate focuses on the needs to strengthen fiscal rules and to restore fiscal...

Hedging strategies for commodity prices largely rely on dynamic models to compute optimal hedge ratios. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the commodity inventory effect (effect by which the commodity price volatility increases more after a positive shock than after a negative...

This paper illustrates some computationally efficient estimation procedures for the estimation of vast dimensional realized covariance models. In particular, we derive a Composite Maximum Likelihood (CML) estimator for the parameters of a Conditionally Autoregressive Wishart (CAW) model...

Several models have been developed to capture the dynamics of the conditional correlations between time series of financial returns, but few studies have investigated the determinants of the correlation dynamics. A common opinion is that the market volatility is a major determinant of the...

Chapter written for the Handbook of Volatility Models and their Applications, edited by Luc Bauwens, Christian Hafner, and Sébastien Laurent, forthcoming in 2012 (John Wiley & sons). This chapter presents an introductory review of volatility models and some applications. The review is linked...

This paper investigates the meaning of systemic risk in energy markets and proposes a methodology to measure it. Energy Systemic Risk is defined by the risk of an energy crisis raising the prices of all energy commodities with negative consequences for the real economy. Measures of the total...

We consider a nonlinear vector model called the logistic vector smooth transition autoregressive model. The bivariate single-transition vector smooth transition regression model of Camacho (2004) is generalised to a multivariate and multitransition one. A modelling strategy consisting of...

Novel model specifications that include a time-varying long run component in the dynamics of realized covariance matrices are proposed. The adopted modeling framework allows the secular component to enter the model structure either in an additive fashion or as a multiplicative factor, and to be...

In this paper, we derive Lagrange multiplier and Lagrange multiplier type specification and misspecification tests for vector smooth transition models. We report results from simulation studies in which the size and power properties of the proposed tests in small samples are considered. The...

The deregulation of European electricity markets has led to an increasing need in understanding the volatility and correlation structure of electricity prices. We model a multivariate futures series of the European Energy Exchange (EEX) index, using an asymmetric GARCH model for volatilities and...