Search results for " volatility"
showing 10 items of 113 documents
Fiscal Convergence, Business Cycle Volatility and Growth
2009
This paper analyzes the effects of fiscal convergence on business cycle volatility and growth. Using a panel 21 OECD countries (including 11 EMU countries) and 40 years of data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have smoother business cycles. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP) is systematically associated with smoother business cycles. We also find evidence that reduced business cycle volatility through higher fiscal convergence stimulates growth. Our empirical results are economically and statistically significant and robust.
Forecasting US Growth During the Great Recession: Is the Financial Volatility the Missing Ingredient?
2012
The Great Recession endured by the main industrialized countries during the period 2008-2009, in the wake of the financial and banking crisis, has pointed out the major role of the financial sector on macroeconomic fluctuations. In this respect, many researchers have started to reconsider the linkages between financial and macroeconomic areas. In this paper, we evaluate the leading role of the daily volatility of two major financial variables, namely commodity and stock prices, in their ability to anticipate the output growth. For this purpose, we propose an extended MIDAS model that allows the forecasting of the quarterly output growth rate using exogenous variables sampled at various high…
On the Link Between Volatility and Growth
2011
A model of growth with endogenous innovation and distortionary taxes is presented. Since innovation is the only source of volatility, any variable that influences innovation directly affects volatility and growth. This joint endogeneity is illustrated by working out the effects through which economies with different tax levels differ in their volatility and growth process. We obtain analytical measures of macro volatility based on cyclical output and on output growth rates for plausible parametric restrictions. This analysis implies that controls for taxes should be included in the standard growth-volatility regressions. Our estimates show that the conventional Ramey-Ramey coefficient is af…
The Stabilizing Role of Government Size
2007
This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model can generate a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of output. However, in the model, we find that the stabilizing effect is only due to a composition effect and it is not present when we look at the volatility of private output. Given that empirically we also observe a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of consumption, we modify the model by i…
Can fiscal decentralization alleviate government consumption volatility?
2016
We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization leads to lower government consumption volatility. This result holds for the sub-sample of advanced economies, while it is not confirmed for those less-developed. This mechanism seems to work mainly through a lower volatility of the non-discretionary spending, which typically belongs to the central government’s policy. We also confirm existing findings according to which country…
Stereotactic Ablative Radiation Therapy for Lung Oligometastases: Predictive Parameters of Early Response by (18)FDG-PET/CT
2017
Abstract Objectives The objective of this study was to investigate fludeoxyglucose F 18 positron emission tomography/computed tomography ( 18 FDG-PET/CT) parameters as predictive of response after stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) for lung oligometastases. Methods The inclusion criteria of the current retrospective study were as follows: (1) lung oligometastases treated by SABR, (2) presence of 18 FDG-PET/CT before and after SABR for at least two subsequent evaluations, (3) Karnofsky performance status higher than 80, and (4) life expectancy longer than 6 months. All patients were treated with a biologically equivalent dose of at least 100 Gy with an alpha/beta ratio of 10. The foll…
The Dynamics of Quote Prices in an Artificial Financial Market with Learning Effects
2007
In this paper we study the evolution of bid and ask prices in an electronic financial market populated by portfolio traders who optimally choose their allocation strategy on the basis of their views about market conditions. Recently, a growing literature has investigated the consequences of learning about the returns process1. There has been an increasing interest in analyzing what are the implications of relaxing the assumption that agents hold correct expectations. In particular, it has been asked the fundamental question of understanding if typical asset-pricing anomalies (like returns predictability, and excess volatility) can be generated by a learning process about the underlying econ…
Catastrophic risks and the pricing of catastrophe equity put options
2021
In this paper, after a review of the most common financial strategies and products that insurance companies use to hedge catastrophic risks, we study an option pricing model based on processes with jumps where the catastrophic event is captured by a compound Poisson process with negative jumps. Given the importance that catastrophe equity put options (CatEPuts) have in this context, we introduce a pricing approach that provides not only a theoretical contribution whose applicability remains confined to purely numerical examples and experiments, but which can be implemented starting from real data and applied to the evaluation of real CatEPuts. We propose a calibration framework based on his…
COMPUTATION OF LOCAL VOLATILITIES FROM REGULARIZED DUPIRE EQUATIONS
2005
We propose a new method to calibrate the local volatility function of an asset from observed option prices of the underlying. Our method is initialized with a preprocessing step in which the given data are smoothened using cubic splines before they are differentiated numerically. In a second step the Dupire equation is rewritten as a linear equation for a rational expression of the local volatility. This equation is solved with Tikhonov regularization, using some discrete gradient approximation as penalty term. We show that this procedure yields local volatilities which appear to be qualitatively correct.
An IMEX-Scheme for Pricing Options under Stochastic Volatility Models with Jumps
2014
Partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) formulations are often preferable for pricing options under models with stochastic volatility and jumps, especially for American-style option contracts. We consider the pricing of options under such models, namely the Bates model and the so-called stochastic volatility with contemporaneous jumps (SVCJ) model. The nonlocality of the jump terms in these models leads to matrices with full matrix blocks. Standard discretization methods are not viable directly since they would require the inversion of such a matrix. Instead, we adopt a two-step implicit-explicit (IMEX) time discretization scheme, the IMEX-CNAB scheme, where the jump term is treated ex…