We set up and estimate a structural unobserved components open economy model for the rate of unemployment and the real exchange rate in Sweden. This approach enables us to simultaneously determine changes in both cyclical and equilibrium rates. Our results show that the Natural Rate/NAIRU has...

In this paper we simultaneously estimate the real exchange rates between the Swedish Krona, the US Dollar and the Euro. A prime candidate for explaining the exchange rate movements is relative potential output. Since this variable is unobservable, cyclical and potential output are estimated in...

How important are financial and labor market frictions for the business cycle dynamics of a small open economy? What are the quantitative effects of increased financial risk on output and inflation? What drives the variation in the intensive and extensive margin of labor supply? What are the...

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC computationally costly, especially in problems with large datasets,...

The computing time for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can be prohibitively large for datasets with many observations, especially when the data density for each observation is costly to evaluate. We propose a framework where the likelihood function is estimated from a random subset of...

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling literature to estimate the log-likelihood accurately using...

Time series subject to parameter shifts of random magnitude and timing are commonly modeled with a change-point approach using Chib's (1998) algorithm to draw the break dates. We outline some advantages of an alternative approach in which breaks come through mixture distributions in state...

The rational expectations efficient market model of the exchange rate has failed empirically. In this paper we develop a model of the exchange rate in which agents use simple forecasting rules. Based on an ex post evaluation of the relative profitability of these rules they decide whether to...

A common finding in the international-economics literature is that the elasticity of substitution between domestically produced and imported goods is smaller in the short than in the long run. Despite this, most of today's commonly used macroeconomic models assume this elasticity to be constant....