This paper tests for fractional roots in the futures prices for selected commodities, foreign currencies, and stock indexes. The fractional testing method is the spectral regression method suggested by Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983). The empirical results suggest the presence of a fractional...

This paper studies of credit rating agency (CRA) downgrade announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

We discuss instrumental variables (IV) estimation in the broader context of the generalized method of moments (GMM), and describe an extended IV estimation routine that provides GMM estimates as well as additional diagnostic tests. Stand-alone test procedures for heteroskedasticity,...

This presentation discusses how the tasks involved with carrying out a sizable research project, involving panel data at both monthly and daily frequencies, could be efficiently managed by making use of built-in and user-contributed features of Stata. The project entails the construction of a...

In this paper we empirically investigate the link between bank lending and macroeconomic uncertainty using annual and quarterly U.S. bank level data. For both data sets, we show that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, captured by an increase in the variability of industrial production or...

We employ threshold cointegration methodology to model the policy problem solved by the Federal Reserve System in their manipulation of the discount rate under a reserves target operating procedure utilized since October 1979. The infrequent and discrete adjustments that characterize movements...

This paper presents the methodology used to construct reliable estimates of the term structure of interest rates for the United States during 1919-30. These monthly term structures are based on individual corporate bonds' price quotations for the majority of U.S. railroad corporations' issues of...

In this paper we empirically investigate whether sectoral business investment fluctuations in the U.K. are due to aggregate or sector-specific innovations. Using quarterly business investment data for ten industrial sectors over 1978-2000, we evaluate the nature of their intercorrelations by the...