The attractiveness of spatial autoregressive models has increased significantly. The awareness of important spatial interactions arose in various fields. In economics, interactions can be due to interdependencies between entities such as states, firms, or consumers. Examples are spatial...

The policies related to regional economic activity developed by European Union (EU) and the role played by regions as economic subject have determined a bigger set of disaggregated statistics at macroeconomic level. The methodologies used nowadays by the Italian national institute of statistics...

I illustrate the importance of choosing the correct space in empirical applications of spatial econometric models. I consider different spatial weighting matrices in an SAR(1) model -- contiguity matrix, distance based matrix and their variants adjusted for size of each observation. I show...

Scientists and epistemologists agree that a scientific law must be relatively simple and not contradicted by the available evidence. We propose and test one such law pertaining to international economics, the triple-parity law. It integrates three well-known equilibrium conditions, which are...

Using monthly data from 1926:01 to 2003:12 for the United States, this paper examines the predictability of real stock prices based on the dividend-price ratio. In particular, we focus on estimating and forecasting a nonlinear exponential smooth autoregressive model (ESTAR). One motivation for...

This paper examines different multivariate models to evaluate what are the main determinants when doing VaR forecasts for a portfolio of assets. To achieve this goal, we unify past multivariate models by using a general copula framework and we propose many new extensions. We differentiate the...

In this paper, we investigate the out-of-sample forecasting ability of a genetic program to approach the dynamic evolution of the Yen/US$ and Pound Sterling/US$ exchange rates, and verify whether the method can beat the random walk model. Later on, we use the predicted values to generate a...

Recent work has found that, without the benefit of hindsight, it can prove difficult for policy-makers to pin down accurately the current position of the output gap; real-time estimates are unreliable. However, attention primarily has focused on output gap point estimates alone. But point...