The welfare effects of PTAs are most directly linked to changes in trade prices, i.e., the terms of trade. This paper employs a simple strategic pricing game in segmented markets to measure the effects of MERCOSUR on the pricing of 'non-member' exports to the region. Working with detailed data...

This paper documents how poorer and less educated US households hold a smaller fraction of foreign assets in their financial portfolio. This average home bias of the poor is partly due to a lower probability of participating in foreign asset markets, often attributed to fixed costs of market...

This paper assesses the performance of Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) for models of different size. We consider standard specifications in the macroeconomic literature based on, respectively, three and eight variables and compare results with those obtained by larger models containing...

This paper analyzes identification conditions, and proposes an estimator, for a dynamic factor model where the idiosyncratic components are allowed to be mutually non-orthogonal. This model, which we call the generalized dynamic factor model, is novel to the literature, and generalizes the...

The Paper uses a large data set, consisting of 447 monthly macroeconomic time series concerning the main countries of the Euro area to simulate out-of-sample predictions of the Euro area industrial production and the harmonized inflation index and to evaluate the role of financial variables in...

This paper studies cross-country patterns of economic growth from the viewpoint of income distribution dynamics. Such a perspective raises new empirical and theoretical issues in growth analysis: the profound empirical regularity is an ‘emerging twin peaks’ in the cross-sectional...

In this paper, we construct a large Bayesian Vector Autoregressive model (BVAR) for the Euro Area that captures the complex dynamic inter-relationships between the main components of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Price (HICP) and their determinants. The model is estimated using Bayesian...

The paper addresses the issue of forecasting a large set of variables using multivariate models. In particular, we propose three alternative reduced rank forecasting models and compare their predictive performance for US time series with the most promising existing alternatives, namely, factor...

This paper, along with the companion paper Forni, Hallin, Lippi and Reichlin (1999), introduces a new model-the generalized dynamic factor model-for the empirical analysis of financial and macroeconomic data sets characterized by a large number of observations both cross-section and over time....

This paper proposes a new way to compute a coincident and a leading index of economic activity. The method provides a unified approach for the selection of the coincident and the leading variables, for averaging them into coincident and leading indexes and for the identification of turning...