Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the...

In this paper we specify a linear Cliff and Ord-type spatial model. The model allows for spatial lags in the dependent variable, the exogenous variables, and disturbances. The innovations in the disturbance process are assumed to be heteroskedastic with an unknown form. We formulate a multi-step...

One important goal of this study is to develop a methodology of inference for a widely used Cliff-Ord type spatial model containing spatial lags in the dependent variable, exogenous variables, and the disturbance terms, while allowing for unknown heteroskedasticity in the innovations. We first...

This paper develops a unified framework for fixed and random effects estimation of higher-order spatial autoregressive panel data models with spatial autoregressive disturbances and heteroskedasticity of unknown form in the idiosyncratic error component. We derive the moment conditions and...

Long-run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just-identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have...

A growing literature uses changes in residual volatility for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. A number of different models for heteroskedasticity or conditional heteroskedasticity are proposed and used in applications in this context. This study reviews the...

We propose a new non-recursive identification scheme for uncertainty shocks, which exploits breaks in the unconditional volatility of macroeconomic variables. Such identification approach allows us to simultaneously address two major questions in the empirical literature on uncertainty: (i) Does...

While coping with nonsphericality of the disturbances, standard GMM suffers from a blind spot for exploiting the most effective instruments when these are obtained directly from unconditional rather than conditional moment assumptions. For instance, standard GMM counteracts that exogenous...

This paper generalizes the approach to estimating a first-order spatial autoregressive model with spatial autoregressive disturbances (SARAR(1,1)) in a cross-section with heteroskedastic innovations by Kelejian and Prucha (2008) to the case of spatial autoregressive models with spatial...