The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

How large are welfare costs related to economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas’ well-known and thoughtprovoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for 11 countries in South America...

This paper develops a limiting theory for Wald tests of weak exogeneity in error correction models (ECMs). It is well known that Wald statistics on cointegrated systems may involve nonstandard distribution and nuisance parameters, if $I(1)$ variables are not negligible in the statistics. To...

This paper proposes a new empirical representation of US inflation expectations in a Stace-Space Markov-Switching framework in order to identify the expectations regimes which are associated with short and long term Phillips curves. Results suggest that the dynamics of in‡ation expectation...

We introduce continuous-time models that capture the salient features of the short-term interest rate and remain tractable for asset pricing applications. We extend classical specifications within and outside of the affine class to multi-factor settings with latent variables that are readily...

This article studies two extensions of the compound Poisson process with iid Gaussian innovations which are able to characterize important features of high frequency security prices. The first model explicitly accounts for the presence of the bid/ask spread encountered in price-driven markets....

A Vector Autoregressive model (VAR) with normally distributed innovations is a Curved Exponential Model (CEM). Cointegration imposes further curvature on the model and this means that in addition to the important reasons for conditioning in non-stationary time series as given by Johansen (1995,...

We propose a general non-linear simultaneous equations framework for the econometric analysis of models of intervention in foreign exchange markets by central banks in response to deviations of exchange rates from possibly time-varying target levels. We consider efficient estimation of possibly...