This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

We propose a new instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. The instrument is constructed by exploiting variations in the price of gold around events that capture periods of changes in uncertainty. The variations in the price of gold around the events...

Set identification in Bayesian vector autoregression (VARs) is becoming increasingly popular while facing recent criticism about potentially unwanted prior dominance and underrepresented bounds of the identified set. This can lead to biased inference even in large samples. Common estimation...

Using a battery of timely multivariate time series techniques I study the Bitcoin cryptocurrency price series and web search queries with regard to their mutual predictability, Granger-causality and cause-effect delay structure. The Bitcoin is at first treated as a general currency, then as a...

We estimate a nonlinear VAR to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty shocks originating in the US on the Canadian unemployment rate in booms and busts. We find strong evidence in favor of asymmetric spillover effects. Unemployment in Canada is shown to react to uncertainty shocks in...

We model U.S. post-WWII monthly data with a Smooth Transition VAR model and study the effects of an unanticipated increase in economic policy uncertainty on unemployment in recessions and expansions. We find the response of unemployment to be statistically and economically larger in recessions....

Recently, Baumeister and Hamilton (henceforth: BH) have argued that existing studies of the global oil market fail to account for uncertainty about their identifying assumptions. They recommend an alternative econometric approach intended to address this concern by formulating priors on the...

In this paper we use a general procedure to detect structural breaks at unknown points in time which allows for different orders of integration and deterministic components in each subsample (see Gil-Alana, 2006). First, we extend it to the non-linear case, and show by means of Monte Carlo...

This paper is concerned with the apparent change in the U.S. oil price-macroeconomy relationship. It is investigated to what extent this change can be accounted for by the large oil price surges witnessed in the 1970s. The innovative approach of rolling impulse responses is applied and both the...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...