Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ex ante projected future trajectories of real tourism exports and relative tourism export prices of the EU-15, conditional on expert real gross domestic product growth forecasts for the global economy provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for the years 2013-2017.

To this end, the global vector autoregression (GVAR) framework is applied to a comprehensive panel data set ranging from 1994Q1 to 2013Q3 for a cross-section of 45 countries. This approach allows for interdependencies between countries that are assumed to be equally affected by common global developments.

In line with economic theory, growing global tourist income combined with decreasing relative destination price ensures, in general, increasing tourism demand for the politically and macroeconomically distressed EU-15. However, the conditional forecast increases in tourism demand are under-proportional for some EU-15 member countries.

Rather than simply relying on increases in tourist income, the low price competitiveness of the EU-15 member countries should also be addressed by tourism planners and developers in order to counter the rising competition for global market shares and ensure future tourism export earnings.

One major contribution of this research is that it applies the novel GVAR framework to a research question in tourism demand analysis and forecasting. Furthermore, the analysis of the ex ante conditionally projected future trajectories of real tourism exports and relative tourism export prices of the EU-15 is a novel aspect in the tourism literature since conditional forecasting has rarely been performed in this discipline to date, in particular, in combination with ex ante forecasting.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the daily conditional variance forecasts of seven GARCH-family models. This paper investigates whether the advanced GARCH models outperform the standard GARCH model in forecasting the variance of stock indices.

Using the daily price observations of 21 stock indices of the world, this paper forecasts one-step-ahead conditional variance with each forecasting model, for the period 1 January 2000 to 30 November 2013. The forecasts are then compared using multiple statistical tests.

It is found that the standard GARCH model outperforms the more advanced GARCH models, and provides the best one-step-ahead forecasts of the daily conditional variance. The results are robust to the choice of performance evaluation criteria, different market conditions and the data-snooping bias.

This study addresses the data-snooping problem by using an extensive cross-sectional data set and the superior predictive ability test (Hansen, 2005). Moreover, it covers a sample period of 13 years, which is relatively long for the volatility forecasting studies. It is one of the earliest attempts to examine the impact of market conditions on the forecasting performance of GARCH models. This study allows for a rich choice of parameterization in the GARCH models, and it uses a wide range of performance evaluation criteria, including statistical loss functions and the Mince-Zarnowitz regressions (Mincer and Zarnowitz 1969). Therefore, the results are more robust and widely applicable as compared to the earlier studies.

The causal relationship between money and income (output) has been an important topic and has been extensively studied. However, those empirical studies are almost entirely on Granger-causality in the conditional mean. Compared to conditional mean, conditional quantiles give a broader picture of an economy in various scenarios. In this paper, we explore whether forecasting conditional quantiles of output growth can be improved using money growth information. We compare the check loss values of quantile forecasts of output growth with and without using past information on money growth, and assess the statistical significance of the loss-differentials. Using U.S. monthly series of real personal income or industrial production for income and output, and M1 or M2 for money, we find that out-of-sample quantile forecasting for output growth is significantly improved by accounting for past money growth information, particularly in tails of the output growth conditional distribution. On the other hand, money–income Granger-causality in the conditional mean is quite weak and unstable. These empirical findings in this paper have not been observed in the money–income literature. The new results of this paper have an important implication on monetary policy, because they imply that the effectiveness of monetary policy has been under-estimated by merely testing Granger-causality in conditional mean. Money does Granger-cause income more strongly than it has been known and therefore information on money growth can (and should) be more utilized in implementing monetary policy.

The paper aims to model multiple-period market risk forecasts under long memory persistence in market volatility.

The paper proposes volatility forecasts based on a combination of the GARCH(1,1)-model with potentially fat-tailed and skewed innovations and a long memory specification of the slowly declining influence of past volatility shocks. As the square-root-of-time rule is known to be mis-specified, the GARCH setting of Drost and Nijman is used as benchmark model. The empirical study of equity market risk is based on daily returns during the period January 1975 to December 2010. The out-of-sample accuracy of VaR predictions is studied for 5, 10, 20 and 60 trading days.

The long memory scaling approach remarkably improves VaR forecasts for the longer horizons. This result is only in part due to higher predicted risk levels. Ex post calibration to equal unconditional VaR levels illustrates that the approach also enhances efficiency in allocating VaR capital through time.

The improved VaR forecasts show that one should account for long memory when calibrating risk models.

The paper models single-period returns rather than choosing the simpler approach of modeling lower-frequency multiple-period returns for long-run volatility forecasting. The approach considers long memory in volatility and has two main advantages: it yields a consistent set of volatility predictions for various horizons and VaR forecasting accuracy is improved.

The purpose of this paper is to study the scope for country diversification in international portfolios of mutual funds for the “core” EMU countries. The author uses a sample of daily returns for country indices of French, German and Italian funds to investigate the quest for international diversification. The author focuses on fixed-income mutual funds during the period of the financial market turmoil since 2007.

The author compute optimal portfolio allocations from both unconstrained and constrained mean-variance frameworks that take as input the out-of-sample forecasts for the conditional mean, volatility and correlation of country-level indices for funds returns. The author also applies a portfolio allocation model based on utility maximization with learning about the time-varying conditional moments. The author compares the out-of-sample forecasting performance of 12 multivariate volatility models.

The author finds that there is a “core” EMU country also for the mutual fund industry: optimal portfolios allocate the largest portfolio weight to German funds, with Italian funds assigned a lower weight in comparison to French funds. This result is remarkably robust across competing forecasting models and optimal allocation strategies. It is also consistent with the findings from a utility-maximization model that incorporates learning about time-varying conditional moments.

This is the first study on optimal country-level diversification for a mutual fund investor focused on European countries in the fixed-income space for the turmoil period. The author uses a large array of econometric models that captures the salient features of a period characterized by large changes in volatility and correlation, and compare the performance of different optimal asset allocation models.

The author shows that extending the estimation window prior to structural breaks in cointegrated systems can be beneficial for forecasting performance and highlights under which conditions. In doing so, the author generalizes the Pesaran and Timmermann (2005)’s forecast error decomposition and shows that it depends on four terms: (1) a period ahead risk; (2) a bias due to a conditional mean shift; (3) a bias due to a variance mismatch; (4) a gap term valid only conditionally. The author also derives new expressions for the estimators of the adjustment matrix and a constant, which are auxiliary to the decomposition. Finally, the author introduces new simulation-based estimators for the finite sample forecast properties which are based on the derived decomposition. The author’s finding points out that, in some cases, parameter instability can be neglected by extending the window backward and forecasters can be insured against higher forecast risk under this model class as well, generalizing Pesaran and Timmermann (2005)’s result. The author’s result gives renewed importance to break tests, in order to distinguish cases when break-neglection is (not) appropriate.

This paper investigates how various strategies for combining forecasts, both simple and optimised approaches, are compared with popular individual risk models in estimating value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) in emerging market at alternative risk levels.

Using the case study of the Vietnamese stock market, the author produced one-day-ahead VaR and ES forecast from seven individual risk models and ten alternative forecast combinations. Next, the author employed a battery of backtesting procedures and alternative loss functions to evaluate the global predictive accuracy of the different methods. Finally, the author investigated the relative performance over time of VaR and ES forecasts using fluctuation test.

The empirical results indicate that, although combined forecasts have reasonable predictive abilities, they are often outperformed by one individual risk model. Furthermore, the author showed that the complex combining methods with optimised weighting functions do not perform better than simple combining methods. The fluctuation test suggests that the poor performance of combined forecasts is mainly due to their inability to cope with periods of instability.

This study reveals the limitation of combining strategies in the one-day-ahead VaR and ES forecasts in emerging markets. A possible direction for further research is to investigate whether this finding holds for multi-day ahead forecasts. Moreover, the inferior performance of combined forecasts during periods of instability motivates further research on the combining strategies that take into account for potential structure breaks in the performance of individual risk models. A potential approach is to improve the individual risk models with macroeconomic variables using a mixed-data sampling approach.

First, the authors contribute to the literature on the forecasting combinations for VaR and ES measures. Second, the author explored a wide range of alternative risk models to forecast both VaR and ES with recent data including periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although forecast combination strategies have been providing several good results in several fields, the literature of forecast combination in the VaR and ES context is surprisingly limited, especially for emerging market returns. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study investigating predictive power of combining methods for VaR and ES in an emerging market.

This chapter studies the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economic structure of the US and EU economies by measuring its impact on some reference macro-economic variables. We use a factor model approach on a set of variables available at different frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly) and provide evidence of instability in the primary factors driving the economy. A sequential analysis of the factors allows us to evaluate the model's forecasting performance and extract some instability measures based on the factor model's eigenvalues. Finally, we show how to use COVID-related variables, such as policy, economic, and health indicators, to compute conditional forecasts with factor models, and perform a scenario analysis on the variables of interest to understand economic instability.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the volatility and forecast accuracy of the Islamic stock market for the period 1999–2017. This period is characterized by the occurrence of several economic and political events such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack and the 2007–2008 global financial crisis.

This study constructs a new hybrid generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH)-type model based on an artificial neural network (ANN). This model is applied to the daily Dow Jones Islamic Market World Index during the period June 1999–January 2017.

The in-sample results show that the volatility of the Islamic stock market can be better described by the fractionally integrated asymmetric power ARCH (FIAPARCH) approach that takes into account asymmetry and long memory features. Considering the out-of-sample analysis, this paper has applied a hybrid forecasting model, which combines the FIAPARCH approach and the ANN. Empirical results reveal that the proposed hybrid model (FIAPARCH-ANN) outperforms all other single models such as GARCH, fractional integrated GARCH and FIAPARCH in terms of all performance criteria used in the study.

The results have some implications for Islamic investors, portfolio managers and policymakers. These implications are related to the optimal portfolio diversification decision, the hedging strategy choice and the risk management analysis.

The paper develops a new framework that combines an ANN and FIAPARCH model that introduces two important features of time series, namely, asymmetry and long memory.

It is rare for the forecasts of one economic forecasting model to always be more accurate than the forecasts from an alternative model. This suggests the possibility of implementing a switching strategy that chooses, at each point in time, the forecasting model that is expected to be most accurate conditional on a set of instruments that are used to track the relative accuracy of the underlying forecasts. The authors analyze the factors determining the expected gains from such a switching rule over a strategy of always using one of the underlying forecasts. The authors derive bounds on the expected gains from switching for both the nested and non-nested cases and also analyze the case with a highly persistent (near-unit root) predictor variable.