The Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) of the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a historical chronology of business cycle turning points. This paper investigates three central aspects about this chronology: (1) How skillful is the BCDC in classifying economic activity into...

This paper provides three measures of the uncertainty associated to an impulse response path: (1) conditional confidence bands which isolate the uncertainty of individual response coefficients given the temporal path experienced up to that point; (2) response percentile bounds} which provide...

This paper extends previous work in Escribano and Jorda (1997) and introduces new LM specification procedures to choose between Logistic and Exponential Smooth Transition Regression (STR) Models. These procedures are simpler, consistent and more powerful than those previously available in the...

This paper investigates the effects of temporal aggregation when the aggregation frequency is variable and possibly stochastic. The results that we report include, as a particular case, the well-known results on fixed-interval aggregation, such as when monthly data is aggregated into quarters. A...

This paper introduces methods for computing impulse response functions that do not require specification and estimation of the unknown dynamic multivariate system itself. The central idea behind these methods is to estimate flexible local projections at each period of interest rather than...

How is econometric analysis (of partial adjustment models) affected by the fact that, while data collection is done at regular, fixed intervals of time, economic decisions are made at random intervals of time? This paper addresses this question by modelling the economic decision making process...

A new LM specification procedure to choose between Logistic and Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (STAR) models is introduced. This procedure has better consistency and power properties than that previously available in the literature. Monte-Carlo simulations and empirical evidence...

This paper investigates the ability of the Federal Reserve to manipulate the overnight rate without open market operations (which Demiralp and Jorda (2000) term the announcement effect), using high-frequency, open-market-desk data. Using similar data, Hamilton (1997) takes advantage of forecast...

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the Federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the Federal funds rate...

A path forecast refers to the sequence of forecasts 1 to H periods into the future. A summary of the range of possible paths the predicted variable may follow for a given confidence level requires construction of simultaneous confidence regions that adjust for any covariance between the elements...