Since the objective of economic policy is to change target variables in the DGP, when economic policy analysis uses an econometric model, it is important that the model delivers reliable inferences about policy responses in the DGP. This requires that the model be congruent and encompassing, and...

This paper reports quarterly ex ante forecasts of macroeconomic activity for the U.S.A., Japan and Australia for the period 1995-1997. The forecasts are based on automated time series models of vector autoregressions (VAR's), reduced rank regressions (RRR's), error correction models (ECM's) and...

We recommend a major shift in the Econometrics curriculum for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. It is essential to include a range of topics that are still rarely addressed in such teaching, but are now vital for understanding and conducting empirical macroeconomic research. We focus on...

Big Data offer potential benefits for statistical modelling, but confront problems including an excess of false positives, mistaking correlations for causes, ignoring sampling biases and selecting by inappropriate methods. We consider the many important requirements when searching for a...

To capture location shifts in the context of model selection, we propose selecting significant step indicators from a saturating set added to the union of all of the candidate variables. The null retention frequency and approximate non-centrality of a selection test are derived using a...