Macroeconomic data have been shown to vary substantially between sources, especially so for low-income countries. While the impact of data revisions on inference is well documented for cross-country studies, there is no systematic analysis of the robustness of results obtained from time series...

The inference for hidden Markov chain models in which the structure is a multiple-equation macroeconomic model raises a number of difficulties that are not as likely to appear in smaller models. One is likely to want to allow for many states in the Markov chain without allowing the number of...

Researchers seldom find evidence of I(2) in exchange rates, prices, and other macroeconomics time series when they test the order of integration using univariate Dickey-Fuller tests. In contrast, when using the multivariate ML trace test we frequently find double unit roots in the data. Our...

This paper describes a moments estimator for a standard state-space model with coefficients generated by a random walk. This estimator does not require that disturbances are normally distributed, but if they are, the proposed estimator is asymptotically equivalent to the maximum likelihood...

We introduce a time series model that captures both long memory and conditional heteroskedasticity and assess their ability to describe the US inflation data. Specifically, the model allows for long memory in the conditional mean formulation and uses a normal mixture GARCH process to...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, "CEV") propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, this could help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

I examine whether or not returns on stock markets are a leading indicator for real macroeconomic developments in Austria, Japan and the USA. Further I deal with the concept of stock market efficiency, the question whether or not information from real and financial sectors of the economy is...

A new test is proposed for the null of absence of serial correlation. The test uses a data-driven smoothing parameter. The resulting test statistic has a standard limit distribution under the null. The smoothing parameter is calibrated to achieve rate-optimality against several classes of...