Seasonality in macroeconomic time series can obscure movements of other components in a series that are operationally more important for economic and econometric analyses. Indeed, in practice one often prefers to work with seasonally adjusted data to assess the current state of the economy and...

Multivariate analysis can help to focus on economic phenomena, including trend and cyclical movements. To allow for potential correlation with seasonality, the present paper studies a three component multivariate unobserved component model, focusing on the case of quarterly data and showing that...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that face search complementarities in the formation of vendor contracts. Search complementarities amplify small differences in productivity among firms. Market concentration fosters monopsony power in the labor...

Within a New Zealand business cycle context, we assess whether Hamilton's (H84) OLS regression methodology produces stylised business cycle facts which are materially different from HP1600 measures, and whether using the H84 predictor and other forecast extensions improves the HP filter's...

Economists typically use seasonally adjusted data in which the assumption is imposed that seasonality is uncorrelated with trend and cycle. The importance of this assumption has been highlighted by the Great Recession. The paper examines an unobserved components model that permits non-zero...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...

This paper introduces a comprehensive database of informal economic activity. The database focuses on measures that have strong cross-country and over time coverage: it includes both model-based and survey-based measures of informality and covers more than 160 economies for the period 1990-2018....

We examine potential selective reporting (publication bias) in the literature on the social cost of carbon (SCC) by conducting a meta-analysis of 809 estimates of the SCC reported in 101 studies. Our results indicate that estimates for which the 95% confidence interval includes zero are less...

We use novel survey data to study firms’ inventory contracts. We document facts about the usage of purchase and sale contracts. We find that firms purchase and sell inventory through three contractual arrangements: fixed price and quantity, fixed price only, and fixed quantity only. The former...

We propose a methodology for producing forecast densities for economic aggregates based on disaggregate evidence. Our ensemble predictive methodology utilizes a linear mixture of experts framework to combine the forecast densities from potentially many component models. Each component represents...