As it is almost 50 years since Phillips (1958), we analyze an historical series on UK wages and their determinants.  Huge changes have occurred over this long run, so congruence is hard to establish: real wages have risen more than 6 fold, and nominal 500 times; laws, technology, wealth...

We evaluate the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of direct multi-step estimation (DMS) for forecasting at several horizons. For forecast accuracy gains from DMS in finite samples, mis-specification and non-stationarity of the DGP are necessary, but when a model is well-specified,...

When breaks occur, equilibrium-correction models (EqCMs) based on cointegration face forecasting problems.  We investigate approaches to alleviate forecast failure following a location shift, including updating, intercept corrections, differencing, and estimating the future impact of an...

Structural models` inflation forecasts are often inferior to those of naive devices. This chapter theoretically and empirically assesses this for UK annual and quarterly inflation, using the theoretical framework in Clements and Hendry (1998, 1999). Forecasts from equilibrium-correction...

Our strategy for automatic selection in potentially non-linear processes is: test for non-linearity in the unrestricted linear formulation; if that test rejects, specify a general model using polynomials, to be simplified to a minimal congruent representation; finally select by encompassing...

We model expenditure on food in the USA, using an extended time series.  Even when a theory is essentially 'correct', it can manifest serious mis-specification if just fitted to data, ignoring its observed characteristics and major external events such as wars, recessions and policy changes. ...

We develop a new automatically-computable test for super exogeneity, using a variant of general-to-specific modeling.  Based on the recent developments of impulse saturation applied to marginal models under the null that no impulses matter, we select the significant impulses for testing in the...

This chapter describes the issues confronting any realistic context for economic forecasting, which is inevitably based on unknowingly mis-specified models, usually estimated from mis-measured data, facing intermittent and often unanticipated location shifts.  We focus on mitigating the...

Almost no economic time series is either weakly or strictly stationary: distributions of economic variables shift over time.  Thus, the present treatment of expectations in economic theories of inter-temporal optimization is inappropriate.  It cannot be proved that conditional expectations...

A new test for non-linearity in the conditional mean is proposed using functions of the principal components of regressors.  The test extends the non-linearity tests based on Kolmogorov-Gavor polynomials (Thursby and Schmidt, 1977, Tsay, 1986, and Terasvirta, Lin and Granger, 1993), but...