There are evidences that the actual global crisis affected the convergence process in EU. Generally, just new adhered countries were more affected by the actual crisis. Today all forecasts are suffering by uncertainty. Last time, economists, with their methods and models, are invoked for actual...

The revolving credit available to consumers changes substantially over the business cycle, life cycle, and for individuals. We show that debt changes at the same time as credit, so credit utilization is remarkably stable. From ages 20-40, for example, credit card limits grow by more than 700...

This article presents three methods to estimate the logarithm of monthly real GDP in Mexico from the Global Indicator of Economic Activity (IGAE): (1) a deterministic approach using the IGAE growth rate; (2) an extension of Denton method; and, (3) the Kalman filter. In these methods the monthly...

Using U.S. real-time data, we show that changes in the unemployment rate unexplained by Okun's Law have significant predictive power for GDP data revisions. A positive (negative) error in Okun's Law in real time implies that GDP will be later revised to show less (more) growth than initially...

We assess the ability of the Reuters/Michigan Surveys of Consumers to predict future changes in consumer expenditures. The information in the Surveys is summarized by means of principal components of consumer attitudes with respect to income and wealth, interest rates, and prices. These summary...

We study the ability of exclusion and sign restrictions to measure monetary policy shocks in small open economies. Our Monte Carlo experiments show that sign restrictions systematically overshoot inflation responses to the said shock, so we propose to add prior information to limit the number of...

We construct inflation pressure indicators based on the long-run relationship that exists between monetary aggregates and prices, once it is adequately adjusted to account for the scale of transactions, as well as the opportunity cost of holding money. To that end, an extensive long-run...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the demand for the monetary aggregate M1 in Mexico. Using cointegration techniques, we identify both a stable long-run relationship between M1 and its determinants, and a statistically sound single-equation error-correction model. Results are used...

This paper presents a new method for identifying triangular systems of time-series data. Identification is the product of a bivariate GARCH process. Relative to the literature on GARCH-based identification, this method distinguishes itself both by allowing for a timevarying covariance and by not...

This paper evaluates five Nowcasting models that forecast Mexico's quarterly GDP: a Dynamic Factor Model (MFD), two Bridge Equation Models (BE) and two Principal Components Models (PCA). The results indicate that the average of the BE forecasts is statistically better than the rest of the models...