Star variables, such as potential output and the neutral real interest rate, are fundamental to economic policymaking but challenging to identify due to their latent nature. Buncic, Pagan, and Robinson (2023) highlight the difficulty of identifying star variables within short macroeconomic...

This study examines stock return predictability via lagged financial variables with unknown stochastic properties. We conduct a battery of predictability tests for US stock returns during the 1927-2012 period, proposing a novel testing procedure which: i) robustifies inference to the degree of...

This paper uses distribution-free formulas for the asymptotic variances of sample quantile income shares - as typically published by statistical agencies as measures of the distribution of income inequality - to calculate how large a survey sample must be in order to estimate a more refined...