Economic policy decisions are often informed by empirical economic analysis. While the decision-maker is usually only interested in good estimates of outcomes, the analyst is interested in estimating the model. Accurate inference on the structural features of a model, such as cointegration, can...

This paper proposes a Structural Error Correction Model (SECM) that allows concurrent estimation of the structural parameters and analysis of cointegration. We amalgamate the Bayesian methods of Kleibergen and Paap (2002) for analysis of cointegration in the ECM, and the Bayesian methods of...

There is considerable disagreement in the empirical macro literature as to the degree of returns to scale in U.S. production. While many studies find evidence of a small degree of increasing returns, standard errors are typically large. This issue is of importance for assessing the possibility...

Cyclical components in economic time series are analysed in a Bayesian framework, thereby allowing prior notions about periodicity to be used. The method is based on a general class of unobserved component models that allow relatively smooth cycles to be extracted. Posterior densities of...

One of the key inputs for inflation targeting regime is the right identification of inflationary or disinflationary pressures. These pressures are usually approximated by the output gap. In this paper we provide an estimation of the Peruvian output gap using a multivariate unobserved component...

The usual index of leading indicators has constant weights on its components and is therefore implicitly premised on the assumption that the dynamical properties of the economy remain the same over time and across phases of the business cycle. We explore the possibility that the business cycle...

We show that the higher order biases of instrumental variable statistics in the strong instrument case indicate the degeneracy of the first order asymptotic distributions of these statistics under weak or many instrument asymptotics. We express the higher order approximations using an estimator...

We consider the estimation of a large number of GARCH models, say of the order of several hundreds. Especially in the multivariate case, the number of parameters is extremely large. To reduce this number and render estimation feasible, we regroup the series in a small number of clusters. Within...

Abstract In many areas of economic analysis, economic theory restricts the shape as well as other characteristics of functions used to represent economic constructs. Obvious examples are the monotonicity and curvature conditions that apply to utility, profit, and cost functions. Commonly, these...

We construct higher order expressions for Wald and Lagrange multiplier (LM) GMM statistics that are based on 2step and continuous updating estimators (CUE). We show that the sensitivity of the limit distribution to weak and many instruments results from superfluous elements in the higher order...