1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to model the FCI jointly with a large set of macroeconomic, financial and trade variables for...

In this paper we re-consider the theoretical basis for the Lucas Critique from the point of view of Robust Decision Theory. We first emphasise that the Lucas Critique rests on a weak theoretical paradigm in that it fails to consider the motivation for the policy change by the government and...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

We use a novel disaggregate sectoral euro area data set with a regional breakdown to investigate price changes and suggest a new method to extract factors from over-lapping data blocks. This allows us to separately estimate aggregate, sectoral, country-specific and regional components of price...

The paper deals with the estimation of monthly indicators of economic activity for the Euro area and its largest member countries that possess the following attributes: relevance, representativeness and timeliness. Relevance is obtained by referring our monthly indicators to gross domestic...

This paper contributes to a theory of rational choice under uncertainty for decision-makers whose preferences are exhaustively described by partial orders representing ""limited information."" Specifically, we consider the limiting case of ""Complete Ignorance"" decision problems characterized...

We show that Maskin monotone social choice correspondences on sufficiently rich domains satisfy a generalized strategy-proofness property, thus generalizing Muller and Satterthwaite''s (1977) theorem to correspondences. From the point of view of Nash implementation theory, the result yields a...

The logic of common belief does not always reflect the logic of individual beliefs. In particular, the Negative Introspection property fails at the common belief level, that is, it can happen that neither is A commonly believed nor is it common belief that A is not commonly believed. Indeed...

We introduce a new approach for the estimation of high-dimensional factor models with regime-switching factor loadings by extending the linear three-pass regression filter to settings where parameters can vary according to Markov processes. The new method, denoted as Markov-switching three-pass...

Temporal aggregation in general introduces a moving average (MA) component in the aggregated model. A similar feature emerges when not all but only a few variables are aggregated, which generates a mixed frequency model. The MA component is generally neglected, likely to preserve the possibility...