Employing a Bayesian approach, we investigate the impact of international business cycles on the UK economy in the context of a smooth transition VAR. We find that British business cycle is asymmetrically influenced by the US, France and Germany. Overall, positive and negative shocks generating...

A message coming out of the recent Bayesian literature on cointegration is that it is important to elicit a prior on the space spanned by the cointegrating vectors (as opposed to a particular identified choice for these vectors). In this note, we discuss a sensible way of eliciting such a prior....

This paper generalises the cointegrating model of Phillips (1991) to allow for I (0) , I (1) and I (2) processes. The model has a simple form that permits a wider range of I (2) processes than are usually considered, including a more flexible form of polynomial cointegration. Further, the...

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...

While some improper priors have attractive properties, it is generally claimed that Bartlett’s paradox implies that using improper priors for the parameters in alternative models results in Bayes factors that are not well defined, thus preventing model comparison in this case. In this paper we...

This paper develops methods of Bayesian inference in a cointegrating panel data model. This model involves each cross-sectional unit having a vector error correction representation. It is flexible in the sense that different cross-sectional units can have different cointegration ranks and...

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...