The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...

Monetary growth in the euro area has exceeded its target since several years. At the same time, the money demand function seems to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in...

Money growth in the euro area has exceeded its target since 2001. Likewise, recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function. The equation appears to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are used. If the link between money balances and...

Time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility are routinely used for structural analysis and forecasting in settings involving a few macroeconomic variables. Applying these models to high-dimensional datasets has proved to be challenging due to intensive computations and...

This article develops a new econometric methodology for performing stochastic model specification search (SMSS) in the vast model space of time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility and correlated state transitions. This is motivated by the concern of over-fitting and the typically...

This paper reconciles two widely used trend-cycle decompositions of GDP that give markedly different estimates: the correlated unobserved components model yields output gaps that are small in amplitude, whereas the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter generates large and persistent cycles. By embedding...

This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as...

Using machine learning methods in a quasi-experimental setting, I study the heterogeneous effects of introducing waste prices - unit prices on household unsorted waste disposal - on waste demands and social welfare. First, using a unique panel of Italian municipalities with large variation in...

Empirical questions such as whether the Phillips curve or the Okun’s law is stable can often be framed as a model comparison—e.g., comparing a vector autoregression (VAR) in which the coefficients in one equation are constant versus one that has time-varying parameters. We develop Bayesian...