This work analyzes the macroeconomic impact of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis on the Italian economy by estimating the contribution of the main transmission channels underlying the recessionary dynamics at play since the second half of 2011. By means of a counterfactual analysis undertaken...

Quantile aggregation (or 'Vincentization') is a simple and intuitive way of combining probability distributions, originally proposed by S. B. Vincent in 1912. In certain cases, such as under Gaussianity, the Vincentized distribution belongs to the same family as that of the individual...

Tests of parameter instabilities are likely to have low power when change-points occur towards the end of the sample. This paper considers various modifications of existing tests and introduces new statistics designed to have high power in such circumstances. The properties of both Wald-type...

A standard model-based trend-cycle decomposition of Italian GDP yields a likelihood function that is relatively flat and has two local maxima. A Bayesian estimation of the model identifies output gap and trend components that match the features of the Italian business cycle well. In a bivariate...

A prolonged period of low inflation, particularly in a situation of monetary policy rates near the zero lower bound, can heighten the risk of inflation expectations de-anchoring from the central bank objective. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of a sequence of deflationary...

The paper considers tests of seasonal integration and cointegration for multivariate time series. The locally best invariant (LBI) test of the null hypothesis of a deterministic seasonal pattern against the alternative of seasonal integration is derived for a model with Gaussian i.i.d....

We consider how unit root and stationarity tests can be used to study the convergence properties of prices and rates of inflation. Special attention is paid to the issue of whether a mean should be extracted in carrying out unit root and stationarity tests and whether there is an advantage to...

This paper considers the problem of testing against stochastic trend and seasonality in the presence of structural breaks and unit roots at frequencies other than those directly under test, which we term unattended breaks and unattended unit roots respectively. We show that under unattended...

The paper examines various tests for assessing whether a time series model requires a slope component. We first consider the simple t-test on the mean of first differences and show that it achieves high power against the alternative hypothesis of a stochastic nonstationary slope as well as...

This paper considers the problem of testing for the presence of stochastic trends in multivariate time series with structural breaks. The breakpoints are assumed to be known. The testing framework is the multivariate Locally Best Invariant test and the common trend test of Nyblom and Harvey...