A decision maker tests whether the gradient of the loss function evaluated at a judgmental decision is zero. If the test does not reject, the action is the judgmental decision. If the test rejects, the action sets the gradient equal to the boundary of the rejection region. This statistical...

Bayesian decisions are observationally identical to decisions with judgment. Decisions with judgment test whether a judgmental decision is optimal and, in case of rejection, move to the closest boundary of the confidence interval, for a given confidence level. The resulting decisions condition...

Testing and estimating 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 and estimate the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...

We use inflation and income growth expectations from the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey to measure the subjective expected pass-through of inflation to income in the main euro area countries. By aggregating consumers' responses to probabilistic questions, we obtain significantly higher...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations a re d riven b y o ne major factor. The...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business...

We construct a growth model with an explicit government role, where more government resources reduce the optimal level of private consumption and of output per worker. In the empirical analysis, for a panel of 108 countries from 1970-2008, we use different proxies for government size and...

Using extreme value theory tools, we demonstrate that the distributions of the exchange market pressure (EMP) series for most of twelve emerging Europe countries have heavy tails, and disregarding their tail properties may lead to substantial underestimation of the probability of tail events....