This paper proposes a new panel model of cross-sectional dependence. The model has a number of potential structural interpretations that relate to economic phenomena such as herding in financial markets. On an econometric level it provides a flexible approach to the modelling of interactions...

We identify a ‘risk news' shock in a vector autoregression (VAR), modifying Barsky and Sims’s procedure, while incorporating sign restrictions to simultaneously identify monetary policy, technology and demand shocks. The VAR-identifed risk news shock is estimated to account for around 2%-12%...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of the first round of quantitative easing (QE) by the Bank of England which started in March 2009. Although Bank Rate, the UK policy rate, was reduced to ½%, effectively its lower bound, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee felt that additional...

This paper derives the optimal lending contract in the financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (BGG). The optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds. This triple indexation results in a...

Testing the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics literature where these tests are...

In this paper we compared the performance of country specific and regional indicators of reserve adequacy in predicting, out of sample, the balance of payment crisis affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve reserve adequacy...

Identification in the context of multivariate state space modelling involves the specification of the dimension of the state vector. One identification approach requires an estimate of the rank of a Hankel matrix. The most frequently used approaches of rank determination rely on information...

We provide a new method for jointly consistently estimating common trends and cycles in unit root nonstationary multivariate systems. We concentrate on the MA representation of the differenced data and we jointly impose the reduced rank restriction for the common cycles and the common trends on...

In this paper we compare the performance of a regional indicator of vulnerability in predicting, out of sample, the crisis events affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve the vulnerability indicator and stochastic simulation is...

In this paper we provide tests for the unit root hypothesis against the occurence of an unspecified number of breaks which may be larger than 2 but smaller that the maximum allowed number of breaks, <i>m</i>, in univariate time series models. The advocated procedure is considerably less computationally...