Monetary policy uncertainty spillovers in time and frequency domains

We use the recently created monthly Interest Rate Uncertainty measure, to investigate monetary policy uncertainty across the US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Japan, Canada, and Sweden in both the time and frequency domains. We find that the largest spillover indices are from innovations in the country itself; however, there are some instances where spillover indices between countries are large. These relationships change over time and we observe large variances in pairwise spillovers during the global financial crisis. We find that most of the volatility is confined to the crisis period. Policy makers should consider accounting for the spillovers from the US, Germany, France and Spain, as we found that they are the most consistent net transmitters of monetary policy uncertainty

Pitfalls and Opportunities in the Use of Extreme Value Theory in Risk Management

Recent literature has trumpeted the claim that extreme value theory (EVT) holds promise for accurate estimation of extreme quantiles and tail probabilities of financial asset returns, and hence hold promise for advances in the management of extreme financial risks. Our view, based on a disinterested assessment of EVT from the vantage point of financial risk management, is that the recent optimism is partly appropriate but also partly exaggerated, and that at any rate much of the potential of EVT remains latent. We substantiate this claim by sketching a number of pitfalls associate with use of EVT techniques. More constructively, we show how certain of the pitfalls can be avoided, and we sketch a number of explicit research directions that will help the potential of EVT to be realized

Demand forecasting: a case study in the food industry

The use of forecasting methods is nowadays regarded as a business ally since it supports both the operational and the strategic decision-making processes. This paper is based on a research project aiming the development of demand forecasting models for a company (designated here by PR) that operates in the food business, more specifically in the delicatessen segment. In particular, we focused on demand forecasting models that can serve as a tool to support production planning and inventory management at the company. The analysis of the company’s operations led to the development of a new demand forecasting tool based on a combination of forecasts, which is now being used and tested by the company.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/201

Business cycles, international trade and capital flows: Evidence from Latin America

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within the LA region there are considerable differences between countries, success stories coexisting with extremely vulnerable economies. They also show that the LA region as a whole is largely dependent on external developments, especially in the years after the great recession of 2008 and 2009. The trade channel appears to be the most important source of business cycle comovement, whilst capital flows are found to have a limited role, especially in the very short run

Multiple shifts and fractional integration in the us and uk unemployment rates

This paper analyses the long-run behaviour of the US and UK unemployment rates by testing for possibly fractional orders of integration and multiple shifts using a sample of over 100 annual observations. The results show that the orders of integration are higher than 0 in both series, which implies long memory. If we assume that the underlying disturbances are white noise, the values are higher than 0.5, i.e., nonstationary. However, if the disturbances are autocorrelated, the orders of integration are in the interval (0, 0.5), implying stationarity and mean-reverting behaviour. Moreover, when multiple shifts are taken into account, unemployment is more persistent in the US than in the UK, implying the need for stronger policy action in the former to bring unemployment back to its original level

Identification of monetary policy in SVAR models: A data-oriented perspective

In the literature using short-run timing restrictions to identify monetary policy shocks in vector-auto-regressions (VAR) there is a debate on whether (i) contemporaneous real activity and prices or (ii) only data typically observed with high frequency should be assumed to be in the information set of the central bank when the interest rate decision is taken. This paper applies graphical modeling theory, a data-based tool, in a small-scale VAR of the US economy to shed light on this issue. Results corroborate the second type of assumption

Inference of financial networks using the normalised mutual information rate

In this paper we study data from financial markets using an information theory tool that we call the normalised Mutual Information Rate and show how to use it to infer the underlying network structure of interrelations in foreign currency exchange rates and stock indices of 14 countries world-wide and the European Union. We first present the mathematical method and discuss about its computational aspects, and then apply it to artificial data from chaotic dynamics and to correlated random variates. Next, we apply the method to infer the network structure of the financial data. Particularly, we study and reveal the interrelations among the various foreign currency exchange rates and stock indices in two separate networks for which we also perform an analysis to identify their structural properties. Our results show that both are small-world networks sharing similar properties but also having distinct differences in terms of assortativity. Finally, the consistent relationships depicted among the 15 economies are further supported by a discussion from the economics view point

Time Varying Quantile Lasso

In the present paper we study the dynamics of penalization parameter λ of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) method proposed by Tibshirani (1996) and extended into quantile regression context by Li and Zhu (2008). The dynamic behaviour of the parameter λ can be observed when the model is assumed to vary over time and therefore the fitting is performed with the use of moving windows. The proposal of investigating time series of λ and its dependency on model characteristics was brought into focus by Hardle et al. (2016), which was a foundation of FinancialRiskMeter (http://frm.wiwi.hu-berlin.de). Following the ideas behind the two aforementioned projects, we use the derivation of the formula for the penalization parameter λ as a result of the optimization problem. This reveals three possible effects driving λ; variance of the error term, correlation structure of the covariates and number of nonzero coefficients of the model. Our aim is to disentangle these three effect and investigate their relationship with the tuning parameter λ, which is conducted by a simulation study. After dealing with the theoretical impact of the three model characteristics on λ, empirical application is performed and the idea of implementing the parameter λ into a systemic risk measure is presented. The codes used to obtain the results included in this work are available on http://quantlet.de/d3/ia/