In modelling macroeconomic time series, often a monthly indicator of global real economic activity is used. We propose a new indicator, named World steel production, and compare it to other existing indicators, precisely the Kilian’s index of global real economic activity and the index of OECD...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement for 189 countries over the period 1961–2010. Contrary to what has previously been reported, we conclude that there is no strong...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of U.S. inflation and the average inflation predictions of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on a sample running from 1968Q4 to 2014Q2. The joint data generating process (DGP) of these data consists of the unobserved components (UC) model of Stock...

The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...

This paper generalizes the popular stochastic volatility in mean model of Koopman and Hol Uspensky (2002) to allow for time-varying parameters in the conditional mean. The estimation of this extension is nontrival since the volatility appears in both the conditional mean and the conditional...

This paper extracts measures of monetary policy surprises for Australia, Canada and the United States using a latent factor framework. We distinguish monetary policy surprises which occur when central banks report new assessments of the economy (or do not reinforce changes expected by market...

We use the wavelet coherence methodology to investigate relations between prices of ethanol and its feedstocks. Our continuous wavelet framework allows for discovering price connections and their evolution in both time and frequency domain in the most important ethanol markets – Brazil and the...

We explore the impact of various forms of globalization upon international risk-sharing applying the KOF globalization indices. The empirical literature, so far, has only investigated economic and financial sides of globalization. By decomposing globalization into its economic, social and...

Applying the variance decomposition developed by Asdrubali et al. (1996), the paper explores for the first time the role and the extent of smoothing channels at a micro level using a sample of UK households. Our empirical analysis of British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data concludes that the...

Product and financial market integration determine the global implications of China’s recent growth surge and its on-going transition from export led growth. These alter China’s structural imbalance (its excess product supply and excess saving), which in turn shifts the...