Quah's [1993a] transition matrix analysis of world income distribution based on annual data suggests an ergodic distribution with twin peaks at the rich and poor end of the distribution. Since the ergodic distribution is a highly non-linear function of the underlying transition matrix estimated...

This paper examines monetary policy in Rudebusch and Svensson's (1999) two equation macroeconomic model when the policymaker recognizes that the model is an approximation and is uncertain about the quality of that approximation. It is argued that the minimax approach of robust control provides a...

In this paper we argue that measured (RPI) inflation is conceptually mismatched with core inflation: the difference is more than just "measurement error". We propose a technique for measuring core inflation, based on an explicit long-run economic hypothesis. Core inflation is defined as that...

We show that the empirical distribution of the roots of the vector auto-regression of order n fitted to T observations of a general stationary or non-stationary process, converges to the uniform distribution over the unit circle on the complex plane, when both T and n tend to infinity so that...

In this paper we consider the implications of a fully specified dynamic general equilibrium model, developed by Smets and Wouters (2003). This is a relatively large-scale forward-looking model, which was shown to provide a good fit to the data. We show that systematically accounting for prior...

We develop a new consistent and simple to compute estimator of the number of factors in the approximate factor models of Chamberlain and Rothchild (1983). Our setting requires both time series and cross-sectional dimensions of the data to be large. The main theoretical advantage of our estimator...