This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. However, recent studies have cautioned against the use of the DIC for comparing latent variable models. In particular, the DIC calculated using the conditional likelihood (obtained by conditioning on the...

Contemporary structural models of the global market for crude oil treat storage demand as a composite of precautionary responses to uncertainty and speculative behavior, due to difficulties in jointly identifying these distinct demand components. This difficulty arises because the underlying...

The spillover effects of interconnectedness between financial assets are decomposed into both sources of shocks and whether they amplify or dampen volatility conditions in the target market. We use historical decompositions to rearrange information from a VAR which includes sources, direction...

We replicate Stern (1993, Energy Economics), who argues and empirically demonstrates that it is necessary (i) to use quality-adjusted energy use and (ii) to include capital and labor as control variables in order to find Granger causality from energy use to GDP. Though we could not access the...

The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...

The empirical support for a DSGE type of real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure that makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. The linear VAR model is extended to...

We consider an adaptive importance sampling approach to estimating the marginal likelihood, a quantity that is fundamental in Bayesian model comparison and Bayesian model averaging. This approach is motivated by the difficulty of obtaining an accurate estimate through existing algorithms that...

This paper studies the importance of intertemporal substitution in consumption for the cyclical co-movement of consumption, net worth and income. We can largely explain the empirical hump-shaped consumption response to a transitory wealth increase by allowing for time-varying returns in an...

We estimate a Factor Augmented Vector autoregression (FAVAR) to identify idiosyncratic exchange rate shocks and examine the effects of these shocks on different sectors of the economy. We find that an unexpected shock to the exchange rate has significant effects on the tradable sector of the...