Espasa and Mayo-Burgos (2013) provide consistent forecasts for an aggregate economic indicator and its basic components as well as for useful sub-aggregates. To do this, they develop a procedure based on single-equation models that includes the restrictions arisen from the fact that some...

Although spectral analysis of stationary stochastic processes has solid mathematical foundations, this is not always so for some non-stationary cases. Here, we establish a rigorous mathematical extension of the classic Fourier spectrum to the case in which there are AR roots in the unit circle,...

This paper is related to the choice of alternative types of public transport modes and its incidence in the Madrid Metropolitan Area. When planning transport facilities, two conditions are needed: efficient estimation of the users' response to changes in prices and in the characteristics of the...

Among the alternative Unobserved Components formulations within the stochastic state space setting, the Dynamic Harmonic Regression (DHR) has proved particularly useful for adaptive seasonal adjustment signal extraction, forecasting and back-casting of time series. Here, we show first how to...

Although the spectral analysis of stationary stochastic processes has solid mathematical foundations, this is not the case for non-stationary stochastic processes. In this paper, the algebraic foundations of the spectral analysis of non-stationary ARMA processes are established. For this purpose...

This paper addresses two important topics in recent economic historiography: globalization and the great divergence. We first present a search for statistical evidence in the Far East of an “Early Globalization” comparable to the one ongoing in the West since the mid-eighteenth century....

Globalization, if defined as the integration of international commodity markets, started in the eighteenth century and progressed gradually and with some setbacks into the nineteenth century, instead of suddenly appearing at some point after the 1820s. We use grain prices in Europe and the...

This paper discusses how to specify the order of a state-space model. To do so, we start by revising existing approaches and find in them two basic shortcomings: (i) some of them have a poor performance in short samples and (ii) most of them are not robust, meaning that their performance...