It is widely known that when there are negative moving average errors, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and BIC tend to select a truncation lag that is very small. Furthermore, size distortions...

This paper studies the error in forecasting a dynamic time series with a deterministic component. We show that when the data are strongly serially correlated, forecasts based on a model which detrends the data before estimating the dynamic parameters are much less precise than those based on an...

We consider issues related to the order of an autoregression selected using information criteria. We study the sensitivity of the estimated order to i) whether the effective number of observations is held fixed when estimating models of different order, ii) whether the estimate of the variance...

This paper considers the implications of omitted mean shifts for estimation and inference in VARs. It is shown that the least squares estimates are inconsistent, and the F test for Granger causality diverges. While model selection rules have the tendency to incorrectly select a lag length that...

If borrowing capacity of indebted households is tied to the value of their home, house prices should enter a correctly specified aggregate Euler equation for consumption. I develop a simple two-agent, dynamic general equilibrium model in which home (collateral) values affect debt capacity and...