Economists struggle to understand the macroeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS. To this end, they have constructed macro models that utilize simplified pictures of the working of the economy and then factor in channels by which HIV/AIDS will have an effect. These models have considerable influence on...

The paper aims at showing that one of the main channels by which the US 2007 financial crisis became a real and global economic crisis is the 'confidence channel', i.e. that the financial crisis affected firms, banks and households’ expectations and confidence, thus leading to what they...

The paper traces the treatment of fiscal policy in mainstream Keynesian models, from IS-LM over simple dynamic New Keynesian models to the most sophisticated New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and compares it with stylized empirical facts on the impact of fiscal...

This note examines labour market performance across countries through the lens of Okun's Law. We find that after the 1970s but prior to the global financial crisis of the 2000s, the Okun's Law relationship between output and unemployment became more homogenous across countries. These changes...

A high and sustained economic growth in conjunction with low inflation is the central objective of macroeconomic policy formulation in both developed and developing countries. Further, studying inflationary processes is an important issue in the current scenario as it allows policy-makers to...

Practitioners do not always use research findings, sometimes because the research is not always conducted in a manner relevant to real-world practice. This survey seeks to close the gap between research and practice on short-term forecasting in real time. Towards this end, we review the most...

Standard economic models assume that the demand for expert predictions arises only under the conditions in which individuals are uncertain about the underlying process generating the data and there is a strong belief that past performances predict future performances. We set up the strongest...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

We propose two methods to choose the variables to be used in the estimation of the structural parameters of a singular DSGE model. The first selects the vector of observables that optimizes parameter identification; the second the vector that minimizes the informational discrepancy between the...

We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non- linear multivariate specification (one-step...