The procedure for estimating probabilities of future investment returns using time-shifted indexes is based on the simple principle that a multi-dimensional conditional probability distribution can be envisioned involving investment total returns (for a single investment or a fixed portfolio of...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

The procedure for estimating probabilities of future investment returns using time-shifted indexes is based on the simple principle that a multi-dimensional conditional probability distribution can be envisioned involving investment total returns (for a single investment or a fixed portfolio of...

Economists often seek to estimate unobserved variables, representing “equilibrium” or “expected” values of economic variables, as benchmarks against which observed, realised values of these variables may be evaluated. Such comparisons are often used as economic policy indicators, for...

Many modelling issues and policy debates in macroeconomics depend on whether macroeconomic times series are best characterized as linear or nonlinear. If departures from linearity exist, it is important to know whether these are endogenously generated (as in, e.g., a threshold autoregressive...

Many modelling issues and policy debates in macroeconomics depend on whether macroeconomic time series are best characterized as linear or nonlinear. If departures from linearity exist, it is important to know whether these are endogenously generated (as in, e.g. a threshold autoregressive...

Since the seminal work by Nelson and Plosser (1982), ubiquitous evidence in favor of the integration hypothesis across a wide range of macroeconomic and financial time series has been reported in the literature. These results have recently come under attack, however, along several fronts. For...

The new KPSS test is used to test the null hypothesis that U.S. real GNP is a trend stationary process. When appropriately sized, the test fails to reject the trend stationary null. This provides an important counter-example to the generic inability to reject the difference stationary null...

One of the leading methods of estimating the structural parameters of DSGE models is the VAR-based impulse response matching estimator. The existing asymptotic theory for this estimator does not cover situations in which the number of impulse response parameters exceeds the number of VAR model...

A common problem in estimating dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models is that the structural parameters of economic interest are only weakly identified. As a result, classical confidence sets and Bayesian credible sets will not coincide even asymptotically, and the mean, mode, or median...