This paper generalizes the popular stochastic volatility in mean model of Koopman and Hol Uspensky (2002) to allow for time-varying parameters in the conditional mean. The estimation of this extension is nontrival since the volatility appears in both the conditional mean and the conditional...

This paper proposes a new approach to estimating high dimensional time varying parameter structural vector autoregressive models (TVP-SVARs) by taking advantage of an empirical feature of TVP-(S)VARs. TVP-(S)VAR models are rarely used with more than 4-5 variables. However recent work has shown...

This paper discusses estimation of US inflation volatility using time varying parameter models, in particular whether it should be modelled as a stationary or random walk stochastic process. Specifying inflation volatility as an unbounded process, as implied by the random walk, conflicts with...

Many recent papers in macroeconomics have used large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving a hundred or more dependent variables. With so many parameters to estimate, Bayesian prior shrinkage is vital in achieving reasonable results. Computational concerns currently limit the range of priors...

Adding multivariate stochastic volatility of a flexible form to large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving over a hundred variables has proved challenging due to computational considerations and over-parameterization concerns. The existing literature either works with homoskedastic models or...

Vector autoregressions combined with Minnesota-type priors are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting. The fact that strong but sensible priors can substantially improve forecast performance implies VAR forecasts are sensitive to prior hyperparameters. But the nature of this sensitivity is...

We estimate the effects of domestic and international sources of macroeconomic uncertainty in three commonly studied small open economies (SOEs): Australia, Canada and New Zealand. To this end, we propose a common stochastic volatility in mean panel VAR (CSVM-PVAR), and develop an efficient...

We propose a methodology for producing forecast densities for economic aggregates based on disaggregate evidence. Our ensemble predictive methodology utilizes a linear mixture of experts framework to combine the forecast densities from potentially many component models. Each component represents...

Empirical work in macroeconometrics has been mostly restricted to using VARs, even though there are strong theoretical reasons to consider general VARMAs. A number of articles in the last two decades have conjectured that this is because estimation of VARMAs is perceived to be challenging and...

We examine whether knowledge of in-sample co-movement across countries can be used in a more systematic way to improve forecast accuracy at the national level. In particular, we ask if a model with common international business cycle factors adds marginal predictive power compared to a domestic...