arXiv subjects

Tibor Szendrei

Publications and source records attributed to Tibor Szendrei.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Macroprudential Policy and Downside Risk: Regime-Dependent Effects of Capital Regulation

This paper employs a Threshold Bayesian Vector Autoregression (TBVAR) to estimate the regime-dependent macroeconomic effects of capital regulation in Hungary. Using the Factor-based Index of Systemic Stress (FISS) as the threshold variable, the model identifies normal and stress regimes consistent with the occasionally binding constraints literature. The TBVAR offers a practical multivariate alternative to Growth-at-Risk for data-constrained economies. Generalised impulse responses reveal a pronounced asymmetry: releasing regulatory capital during stress raises GDP growth at the peak, with effects persisting for roughly twenty months, while the cost of accumulating capital in the normal regime is economically negligible. These findings are robust to alternative Cholesky orderings, sample periods, and credit variable definitions, providing direct empirical support for the countercyclical operation of the capital buffer.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2026

A Roof Over Risk: A House Price-at-Risk Framework for Hungary

This paper develops a House Price-at-Risk framework to examine how housing subsidies, credit conditions, and supply factors influence the distribution of house price growth in Hungary. Using quantile regression with adaptive LASSO variable selection, we identify variables driving downside versus upside risks across multiple horizons. Financial stress dominates the lower tail at short horizons, while unemployment and affordability constraints become the primary drivers of downside risk at longer horizons. Housing subsidies exhibit pro-cyclical characteristics, concentrating significant positive effects on the upper quantiles while leaving the lower tail largely unaffected. Supply-side variables display horizon-dependent sign reversals, with construction permits exerting upward pressure on prices in the short run but moderating them as supply materialises. Uncertainty decomposition reveals persistent left-tail dominance across all horizons. These findings suggest that macroprudential frameworks should account for the distributional effects of housing subsidies, particularly their pro-cyclical influence on house price growth.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2025

Joint Quantile Shrinkage: A State-Space Approach toward Non-Crossing Bayesian Quantile Models

Crossing of fitted conditional quantiles is a prevalent problem for quantile regression models. We propose a new Bayesian modelling framework that penalises multiple quantile regression functions toward the desired non-crossing space. We achieve this by estimating multiple quantiles jointly with a prior on variation across quantiles, a fused shrinkage prior with quantile adaptivity. The posterior is derived from a decision-theoretic general Bayes perspective, whose form yields a natural state-space interpretation aligned with Time-Varying Parameter (TVP) models. Taken together our approach leads to a Quantile-Varying Parameter (QVP) model, for which we develop efficient sampling algorithms. We demonstrate that our proposed modelling framework provides superior parameter recovery and predictive performance compared to competing Bayesian and frequentist quantile regression estimators in simulated experiments and a real-data application to multivariate quantile estimation in macroeconomics.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Fused LASSO as Non-Crossing Quantile Regression

Growth-at-Risk is vital for empirical macroeconomics but is often suspect to quantile crossing due to data limitations. While existing literature addresses this through post-processing of the fitted quantiles, these methods do not correct the estimated coefficients. We advocate for imposing non-crossing constraints during estimation and demonstrate their equivalence to fused LASSO with quantile-specific shrinkage parameters. By re-examining Growth-at-Risk through an interquantile shrinkage lens, we achieve improved left-tail forecasts and better identification of variables that drive quantile variation. We show that these improvements have ramifications for policy tools such as Expected Shortfall and Quantile Local Projections.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2025

Crossing penalised CAViaR

Dynamic quantiles, or Conditional Autoregressive Value at Risk (CAViaR) models, have been extensively studied at the individual level. However, efforts to estimate multiple dynamic quantiles jointly have been limited. Existing approaches either sequentially estimate fitted quantiles or impose restrictive assumptions on the data generating process. This paper fills this gap by proposing an objective function for the joint estimation of all quantiles, introducing a crossing penalty to guide the process. Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical application on the FTSE100 validate the effectiveness of the method, offering a flexible and robust approach to modelling multiple dynamic quantiles in time-series data.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2024

Momentum Informed Inflation-at-Risk

Growth-at-Risk has recently become a key measure of macroeconomic tail-risk, which has seen it be researched extensively. Surprisingly, the same cannot be said for Inflation-at-Risk where both tails, deflation and high inflation, are of key concern to policymakers, which has seen comparatively much less research. This paper will tackle this gap and provide estimates for Inflation-at-Risk. The key insight of the paper is that inflation is best characterised by a combination of two types of nonlinearities: quantile variation, and conditioning on the momentum of inflation.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2024

MIDAS-QR with 2-Dimensional Structure

Mixed frequency data has been shown to improve the performance of growth-at-risk models in the literature. Most of the research has focused on imposing structure on the high-frequency lags when estimating MIDAS-QR models akin to what is done in mean models. However, only imposing structure on the lag-dimension can potentially induce quantile variation that would otherwise not be there. In this paper we extend the framework by introducing structure on both the lag dimension and the quantile dimension. In this way we are able to shrink unnecessary quantile variation in the high-frequency variables. This leads to more gradual lag profiles in both dimensions compared to the MIDAS-QR and UMIDAS-QR. We show that this proposed method leads to further gains in nowcasting and forecasting on a pseudo-out-of-sample exercise on US data.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2024

Non-stationary Financial Risk Factors and Macroeconomic Vulnerability for the UK

Tracking the build-up of financial vulnerabilities is a key component of financial stability policy. Due to the complexity of the financial system, this task is daunting, and there have been several proposals on how to manage this goal. One way to do this is by the creation of indices that act as a signal for the policy maker. While factor modelling in finance and economics has a rich history, most of the applications tend to focus on stationary factors. Nevertheless, financial stress (and in particular tail events) can exhibit a high degree of inertia. This paper advocates moving away from the stationary paradigm and instead proposes non-stationary factor models as measures of financial stress. Key advantage of a non-stationary factor model is that while some popular measures of financial stress describe the variance-covariance structure of the financial stress indicators, the new index can capture the tails of the distribution. To showcase this, we use the obtained factors as variables in a growth-at-risk exercise. This paper offers an overview of how to construct non-stationary dynamic factors of financial stress using the UK financial market as an example.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2021

Decoupling Shrinkage and Selection for the Bayesian Quantile Regression

This paper extends the idea of decoupling shrinkage and sparsity for continuous priors to Bayesian Quantile Regression (BQR). The procedure follows two steps: In the first step, we shrink the quantile regression posterior through state of the art continuous priors and in the second step, we sparsify the posterior through an efficient variant of the adaptive lasso, the signal adaptive variable selection (SAVS) algorithm. We propose a new variant of the SAVS which automates the choice of penalisation through quantile specific loss-functions that are valid in high dimensions. We show in large scale simulations that our selection procedure decreases bias irrespective of the true underlying degree of sparsity in the data, compared to the un-sparsified regression posterior. We apply our two-step approach to a high dimensional growth-at-risk (GaR) exercise. The prediction accuracy of the un-sparsified posterior is retained while yielding interpretable quantile specific variable selection results. Our procedure can be used to communicate to policymakers which variables drive downside risk to the macro economy.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2021

Horseshoe Prior Bayesian Quantile Regression

This paper extends the horseshoe prior of Carvalho et al. (2010) to Bayesian quantile regression (HS-BQR) and provides a fast sampling algorithm for computation in high dimensions. The performance of the proposed HS-BQR is evaluated on Monte Carlo simulations and a high dimensional Growth-at-Risk (GaR) forecasting application for the U.S. The Monte Carlo design considers several sparsity and error structures. Compared to alternative shrinkage priors, the proposed HS-BQR yields better (or at worst similar) performance in coefficient bias and forecast error. The HS-BQR is particularly potent in sparse designs and in estimating extreme quantiles. As expected, the simulations also highlight that identifying quantile specific location and scale effects for individual regressors in dense DGPs requires substantial data. In the GaR application, we forecast tail risks as well as complete forecast densities using the McCracken and Ng (2020) database. Quantile specific and density calibration score functions show that the HS-BQR provides the best performance, especially at short and medium run horizons. The ability to produce well calibrated density forecasts and accurate downside risk measures in large data contexts makes the HS-BQR a promising tool for nowcasting applications and recession modelling.

econ.EM↗