Optimal nominal interest rates rule are usually set assuming that the underlying world is linear. Our work relaxes this assumption and examines the performance of optimal rules when non-linearities are present. In particular if the inflation-output trade off exhibits non linearities...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the in.uential work...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the in.uential work...

This paper provides a general framework for aggregating linear dynamic models by deriving the aggregate model as an optimal prediction of the aggregate variable of interest with respect to an aggregate information set generated by current and past values of available aggregate observations. The...

This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...

Many historians now reject quantitative methods as inappropriate to understanding past societies. It is argued here, however, that no sharp distinction between qualitative and quantitative concepts can be drawn, as almost any concept used to describe a past society is implicitly quantitative....

This paper addresses the problem of forecast evaluation in the context of a simple but realistic decision problem, and proposes a procedure, for the evaluation for forecats based on their average realized value to the decision maker.

This paper presents a canonical, econometric model of contagion and investigates the conditions under which contagion can be distinguished from inter-dependence. In a two-country (market) set-up it is shown that for a range of fundamentals the solution is not unique, and for sufficiently large...

This paper considers the statistical analysis of large panel data sets where even after conditioning on common observed e¤ects the cross section units might remain dependently distributed. This could arise when the cross section units are subject to unobserved common e¤ects and/or if there are...