Este documento describe la metodología desarrollada por Vapnik (1995), denominada máquinas de vectores de soporte (SVM, por sus siglas en inglés) y realiza dos aplicaciones al caso de clasificación de agentes para el otorgamiento de créditos a partir de sus características. El primer caso...

In this document we estimate credit and GDP cycles for three Latin-American economies and study their relation in the time and frequency domains. Cycles are estimated in order to analyze their medium and short-term frequencies. We find that short-term cycles are usually more volatile than...

The history of economic recessions has shown that every deep downturn has been accompanied by disruptions in the ?financial sector. Paradoxically, up until the ?financial world crisis of 2007-2009, little attention was given to macroeconomic and ?financial interdependence. And, in spite of a...

In this paper, we propose a methodology for calculating a leading index of the economic activity based on a modification of Stock and Watson’s (1989, 1991, 1992) approach. We use Kalman filter techniques for estimating the state space representation of the leading index model. The methodology...

Typically, central banks use a variety of individual models (or a combination of models) when forecasting inflation rates. Most of these require excessive amounts of data, time, and computational power; all of which are scarce when monetary authorities meet to decide over policy interventions....

We propose to assess the performance of k forecast procedures by exploring the distributions of forecast errors and error losses. We argue that non systematic forecast errors minimize when their distributions are symmetric and unimodal, and that forecast accuracy should be assessed through...

Este trabajo evalúa si las transformaciones de potencia (Box-Cox y en particular logarítmica) de series de tiempo mejoran la precisión de los pronósticos de modelos ARIMA ajustados a variables económicas de Colombia en dos periodos diferentes: 1980-1995 y 2002-2012. Se compara la habilidad...

Este documento combina estimaciones de ocho metodologías de la brecha del producto colombiano para el período comprendido entre el primer trimestre de 1994 y el tercer trimestre de 2012. A partir de modelos VAR que incluyen las diferentes brechas y la inflación se construyen las densidades...

In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology to determine the existence of credit booms, which is a complex and crucial issue for policymakers. In particular, we exploit the Mendoza and Terrones (2008)´s idea that macroeconomic aggregates other than the credit growth rate contain...

In this document we use the Expectations Survey conducted monthly by the Central Bank of Colombia during the period of October 2003 - August 2012. We find that exchange rate revaluations were generally followed by expectations of further revaluation in the short run (1 month), but by...