The high level of extreme poverty or those experiencing hunger in the country is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed by our policymakers. Official government statistics and data from self-rated hunger surveys show an increasing trend in hunger incidence among households. On the...

The population debate in the country has been dynamic and contentious. On the one hand, proponents of population management say that the rapid population growth in the Philippines has hindered the country’s economic development. On the other hand, others are saying that population growth is...

Financial institutions hold risks in their investments that can potentially affect their ability to serve their clients. For banks to weigh their risks, Value-at-Risk (VaR) methodology is used, which involves studying the distribution of losses and formulating a statistic from this distribution....

Reducing hunger incidence in the country is still the major policy challenge confronting our leaders today. Statistics on hunger produced by both government and private institutions show a very slow reduction in hunger incidence over the last five years. Official data from Philippines Statistics...

The estimated Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) model is sensitive to model misspecifications, such as omitted variables, incorrect lag-length, and excluded moving average terms, which results in biased and inconsistent parameter estimates. Furthermore, the symmetric VAR model is more likely...

Wind energy is the fastest growing renewable energy technology. Wind turbines do not produce any form of pollution and when strategically placed, it naturally blends with the natural landscape. In the long run, the cost of electricity using wind turbines is cheaper than conventional power plants...

The high poverty incidence in the county is a concern that needs to be addressed by our policy makers. Official poverty statistics from the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) shows that the reduction in poverty over the past two decades has been quite dismal from 38% in 1988 to 26%...

The country’s small and open economy is vulnerable to both internal and external shocks. Is it therefore important for policy makers to have timely forecasts on the movement of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whether it will increase or decrease in the current quarter, to be able...

Frequency mismatch has been a problem in econometrics for quite some time. Many monthly economic and financial indicators are normally aggregated to match quarterly macroeconomic series such as GDP when analysed in a statistical model. However, temporal aggregation, although widely accepted, is...

Stylized facts on financial time series data are the volatility of returns that follow non-normal conditions such as leverage effects and heavier tails leading returns to have heavier magnitudes of extreme losses. Value-at-risk is a standard method of forecasting possible future losses in...