This paper discusses the consumption-wealth relationship. Following the recent influential work of Lettau and Ludvigson [e.g. Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), (2004)], we use data on consumption, assets and labor income and a vector error correction framework. Key findings of their work are that...

Economic policy decisions are often informed by empirical economic analysis. While the decision-maker is usually only interested in good estimates of outcomes, the analyst is interested in estimating the model. Accurate inference on the structural features of a model, such as cointegration, can...

In recent years state space models, particularly the linear Gaussian version, have become the standard framework for analyzing macro-economic and financial data. However, many theoretically motivated models imply non-linear or non-Gaussian specifications or both. Existing methods for estimating...

In recent years state space models, particularly the linear Gaussian version, have become the standard framework for analyzing macro-economic and financial data. However, many theoretically motivated models imply non-linear or non-Gaussian specifications – or both. Existing methods for...

This paper discusses estimation of US inflation volatility using time varying parameter models, in particular whether it should be modelled as a stationary or random walk stochastic process. Specifying inflation volatility as an unbounded process, as implied by the random walk, conflicts with...

The time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model has been used to successfully model interest rates and other variables. As many short interest rates are now near their zero lower bound (ZLB), a feature not included in the standard TVP-VAR specification, this model is no longer...

This article develops a new econometric methodology for performing stochastic model specification search (SMSS) in the vast model space of time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility and correlated state transitions. This is motivated by the concern of over-fitting and the typically...

In this paper a potential solution is given to the conflict in Bayesian inference between the desire to employ diffuse priors to represent ignorance and the desire to report proper posterior probabilities for alternative models. Using the concept of Stiefel manifolds, diffuse priors are...

A Bayesian model averaging procedure is presented within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes and applied to two empirical issues. First, stability of the "Great Ratios" in U.S. macro-economic time series is investigated, together with the presence and e¤ects of permanent shocks....

The purpose of this paper is to survey and critically assess the Bayesian cointegration literature. In one sense, Bayesian analysis of cointegration is straightforward. The researcher can combine the likelihood function with a prior and do Bayesian inference with the resulting posterior....