This paper examines structural changes in the Italian manufacturing sector, focusing on labour productivity in recent decades. To this end it distinguishes between trend and cyclical movements in the data using a multivariate unobserved components model. Changes in the relative importance of...

Stated choice models based on the random utility framework are becoming increasingly popular in the applied economics literature. The need to account for respondents' preference heterogeneity in such models has motivated researchers in agricultural, environmental, health and transport economics...

Nowadays, speeding is one of the most relevant problems for traffic safety and most resistant to change in motorized countries. The key instruments in Speed Management Policy are speed limits. This road safety strategy is often established or changed, in order to save fuel during periods of...

This paper extends previous empirical research on the determinants of aggregate property crime rates in two dimensions.  First, we examine the effect of inflation on property crime rates.  Then, using a structural time-series approach we show that it is possible to estimate consistently the...

This paper extends empirical research on determinants of divorce in two ways. First, I examine the effect of inflation on divorce. Second, the use of a structural time-series modeling approach attributes unobservables and omitted variables to an unobserved component, which allows for the...

This paper evaluates the link between inflation and inflation uncertainty in a context of monetary policy regime shifts for the Peruvian economy. We use a model of unobserved components subject to regime shifts to evaluate this link. We verify that periods of high(low) inflation me an were...

We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro economic fundamentals in an intensity based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor's over the period 1980-2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

This paper discusses identification, specification, estimation and forecasting for a general class of periodic unobserved components time series models with stochastic trend, seasonal and cycle components. Convenient state space formulations are introduced for exact maximum likelihood...