Inference on ordinary unit roots, seasonal unit roots, seasonality and business cycles are fundamental issues in time series econometrics. This paper proposes a novel approach to inference on these features by focusing directly on the roots of the autoregressive polynomial rather than taking the...

This paper examines the intensity of financial crises during the 1990s with a view to informing crisis prevention and mitigation policies. We compare the performance of a full Bayesian and an information-theoretic approach in addressing the econometric problems posed by the lack of a unifying...

Chile put into place broad free trade agreements (FTAs) with its two major trading partners: the EU (effective 2003) and the US (effective 2004). This paper quanti- fies their economic effects for the Chilean economy, stemming from the conventional trade components (lower tariffs and higher...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

We argue that cross-country convergence of output per capita should be examined in a fractional-integration time-series context and we propose a new empirical strategy to test it, which is the first one that discriminates between fractional long-run convergence and fractional catching-up. The...

The new monetary policy implemented in Uruguay in July 2002, rests on the existence of a stable relationship between the intermediate monetary aggregate and the price level, particularly during rough times, such as financial crises (1982-83; 2001-02). This paper analyzes the stability of...

We extend the standard specification of the market price of risk for affine yield models of the term structure of interest rates, and estimate several models using the extended specification. For most models, the extended specification fits US data better than standard specifications, often with...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted under the assumption of mean squared error loss. Under this loss function optimal forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors should be serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with...