In this paper we forecast daily returns of crypto-currencies using a wide variety of different econometric models. To capture salient features commonly observed in financial time series like rapid changes in the conditional variance, non-normality of the measurement errors and sharply increasing trends, we develop a time-varying parameter VAR with t-distributed measurement errors and stochastic volatility. To control for overparameterization, we rely on the Bayesian literature on shrinkage priors that enables us to shrink coefficients associated with irrelevant predictors and/or perform model specification in a flexible manner. Using around one year of daily data we perform a real-time forecasting exercise and investigate whether any of the proposed models is able to outperform the naive random walk benchmark. To assess the economic relevance of the forecasting gains produced by the proposed models we moreover run a simple trading exercise.

This study develops a multi-period log-return quantile forecasting procedure to evaluate the performance of eleven nearby commodity futures contracts (NCFC) using a sample of 897 daily price observations and at-the-money (ATM) put and call implied volatilities of the corresponding prices for the period from 1/16/2008 to 7/29/2011. The statistical approach employs dynamic log-returns quantile regression models to forecast price densities using implied volatilities (IVs) and factors estimated through principal component analysis (PCA) from the IVs, pooled IVs and lagged returns. Extensive in-sample and out-of-sample analyses are conducted, including assessment of excess trading returns, and evaluations of several combinations of quantiles, model specifications, and NCFC's. The results suggest that the IV-PCA-factors, particularly pooled return-IV-PCA-factors, improve quantile forecasting power relative to models using only individual IV information. The ratio of the put-IV to the call-IV is also found to improve quantile forecasting performance of log returns. Improvements in quantile forecasting performance are found to be better in the tails of the distribution than in the center. Trading performance based on quantile forecasts from the models above generated significant excess returns. Finally, the fact that the single IV forecasts were outperformed by their quantile regression (QR) counterparts suggests that the conditional distribution of the log-returns is not normal.

This paper puts forward a Bayesian Global Vector Autoregressive Model with Common Stochastic Volatility (B-GVAR-CSV). We assume that Country specific volatility is driven by a single latent stochastic process, which simplifies the analysis and implies significant computational gains. Apart from computational advantages, this is also justified on the ground that the volatility of most macroeconomic quantities considered in our application tends to follow a similar pattern. Furthermore, Minnesota priors are used to introduce shrinkage to cure the curse of dimensionality. Finally, this model is then used to produce predictive densities for a set of macroeconomic aggregates. The dataset employed consists of quarterly data spanning from 1995:Q1 to 2012:Q4 and includes 45 economies plus the Euro Area. Our results indicate that stochastic volatility specifications influences accuracy along two dimensions: First, it helps to increase the overall predictive fit of our model. This result can be seen for some variables under scrutiny, most notably for real GDP and short-term interest rates. Second, it helps to make the model more resilient with respect to outliers and economic crises. This implies that when evaluated over time, the log predictive scores tend to show significantly less variation as compared to homoscedastic models. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Heteroscedasticity (or time-dependent volatility) in economic and financial time series has been recognized for decades. Still, heteroscedasticity is surprisingly often neglected by practitioners and researchers. This may lead to inefficient procedures. Much of the work in this thesis is about finding more effective ways to deal with heteroscedasticity in economic and financial data. Paper I suggest a filter that, unlike the Box-Cox transformation, does not assume that the heteroscedasticity is a power of the expected level of the series. This is achieved by dividing the time series by a moving average of its standard deviations smoothed by a Hodrick-Prescott filter. It is shown that the filter does not colour white noise. An appropriate removal of heteroscedasticity allows more effective analyses of heteroscedastic time series. A few examples are presented in Paper II, III and IV of this thesis. Removing the heteroscedasticity using the proposed filter enables efficient estimation of the underlying probability distribution of economic growth. It is shown that the mixed Normal - Asymmetric Laplace (NAL) distributional fit is superior to the alternatives. This distribution represents a Schumpeterian model of growth, the driving mechanism of which is Poisson (Aghion and Howitt, 1992) distributed innovations. This distribution is flexible and has not been used before in this context. Another way of circumventing strong heteroscedasticity in the Dow Jones stock index is to divide the data into volatility groups using the procedure described in Paper III. For each such group, the most accurate probability distribution is searched for and is used in density forecasting. Interestingly, the NAL distribution fits best also here. This could hint at a new analogy between the financial sphere and the real economy, further investigated in Paper IV. These series are typically heteroscedastic, making standard detrending procedures, such as Hodrick-Prescott or Baxter-King, inadequate. Prior to this comovement study, the univariate and bivariate frequency domain results from these filters are compared to the filter proposed in Paper I. The effect of often neglected heteroscedasticity may thus be studied.

In this thesis I apply modern econometric techniques on macroeconomic time series. Forecasting is here developed along several dimensions in the three chapters. The chapters are in principle self-contained. However, a common element is represented by the business cycle analysis. In the first paper, which primarily deals with the problem of forecasting euro area inflation in the short and medium run, we also compute the country-specific responses of a common business cycle shock. Both chapters 2 and 3 deal predominately with business cycle issues from two different perspectives. The former chapter analyses the business cycle as a dichotomous non-observable variable and addresses the issue of evaluating the euro area business cycle dating formulated by the CEPR committee, while the latter chapter studies the entire distribution of GDP growth. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished