The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

This paper extends the analytical valuation of options on the maximum or the minimum of several risky assets in several directions. The first extension consists in including more assets in the payoff and making the latter more flexible by adding knock-in and knock-out provisions. The second...

Different identification schemes for monetary policy shocks have been proposed in the literature. They typically specify just-identifying restrictions in a standard structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework. Thus, in this framework the different schemes cannot be checked against the data...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bivariate...

This paper applies a simple probabilistic approach to debt sustainability analysis to the case of Lebanon. The paper derives "fan charts" to depict the probability distribution of the government debt to GDP ratio under a medium-term adjustment scenario, as a result of shocks to GDP growth and...

Following record low interest rates and fast depreciating U.S. dollar, crude oil prices became under rising pressure and seemed boundless. Oil price process parameters changed drastically in 2003M5-2007M10 toward consistently rising prices. Short-term forecasting would imply persistence of...

We analyze the performance of kernel density methods applied to grouped data to estimate poverty (as applied in Sala-i-Martin, 2006, QJE). Using Monte Carlo simulations and household surveys, we find that the technique gives rise to biases in poverty estimates, the sign and magnitude of which...