New estimates of an aggregate long-term production function for the post-war U.S. economy are reported. The results indicate that this long-term aggregate production function exhibits a slight but statistically significant increasing returns to scale. Since virtually all econometric growth...

This paper characterizes the co-movements in commodity prices with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes commodity returns into global, sectoral, and idiosyncratic components. The results indicate that global and sectoral factors are important sources of co-movements in commodity...

Arguing that crises are similar if they are predictable from historical experience, we employ panel logit models to examine similarities in the run-ups to the current global financial crisis and historical banking crises. Asset bubbles are the most common precursors.

This paper suggests using a unit t-value criterion in imposing restrictions on lags to formulate a subset vector autoregressive (VAR) model for the purpose of point forecasts. Among any other alternative models nested to the initial VAR model, this less restrictive modeling strategy produces the...

We examine the efficiency of German forecasts for output growth and inflation allowing for an asymmetric loss function of the forecasters. We find the loss of output growth forecasts to be approximately symmetric while there is an asymmetry in the loss of the inflation forecasts. The information...

We use a threshold vector autoregression to study the effects of monetary policy shocks on the US. Depending on the level of inflation we note important regime dependence in the inflation response to monetary policy shocks.

This note presents a simple method for estimating the state vector of linearized DSGE models without using the Kalman filter. The conditional covariance matrix of the state vector is also derived. The method can easily cope with filtered data, and with arbitrary patterns of missing observations.

A novel procedure is applied to test for switches between hysteresis and the natural rate theory over more than a century of UK and USA unemployment data. For both the countries we see a period conforming to hysteresis starting in the early 1920s for the UK and 1930 for USA.

The informational value of the aggregate US unemployment rate has recently been questioned because of a unit root in the labor-force participation rate; the lack of mean reversion implies that long-run changes in unemployment rates are highly unlikely to reflect long-run changes in joblessness....

This paper introduces nowcasting causality as the mixed-frequency version of instantaneous causality. We analyze the relationship between nowcasting and Granger causality in a mixed-frequency VAR and illustrate its impact on the significance of high-frequency variables in mixed-frequency...