This paper assesses the ability of different models to forecast key real and nominal U.S. monthly macroeconomic variables in a data-rich environment and from the perspective of a real-time forecaster, i.e. taking into account the real-time data revisions process and data flow. We find that for...

An incomplete manuscript on Statistics for economists.

Credit constraints that link a private agent's debt to market-determined prices embody a systemic credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and (constrained) socially optimal equilibria, which induces private agents to ``overborrow". We quantify the effects of this externality...

The credit crisis roiling the world's financial markets will likely take years and entire careers to fully understand and analyze. A short empirical investigation of the current trends, however, demonstrates that the losses in certain markets, in this case the US equity markets, follow a cascade...

The empirical saddlepoint likelihood (ESPL) estimator is introduced. The ESPL provides improvement over one-step GMM estimators by including additional terms to automatically reduce higher order bias. The first order sampling properties are shown to be equivalent to efficient two-step GMM. New...

The paper focuses on the comparison of the direct and iterated AR predictors when Xt is a difference stationary process. In particular, it provides some useful results for comparing the efficiency of the two predictors and for extracting the trend from macroeconomic time series using the two...

Most popular approaches for modeling electricity prices rely at present on microeconomics rationale. They aim to study the interaction between decisions of agents in the market, and usually represent the impact of uncertainty in such decisions in a simplified way. The usual methodology of...

In this paper we apply different methods to calculate the potential output of the Dominican Republic. The estimates were made using two data sets. First, we use a quarterly data set covering the period 1980-2006 and then an annual data set for the period 1950-2006 is used. The results of the...

The paper describes and explains empirically the economic performance of four key creative industries (the book publishing, music sound recording, film production and software industries) in five Arab countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon). Using the Porter (Diamond) model as...

I estimate and compare the effects of globalization, governance, and conventional factors and forces on the economic performance of Sub-Saharan African countries. The analysis finds that both physical and human capita as well as unexplained technical residuals affect economic performance,...