The study investigates the existence and extent of information rigidity in inflation forecasts among 25 developed and 18 developing economies during 2002-2017 period utilizing a survey data set never explored before on this issue. In general, the study finds some evidence of information...

This study focuses on the consensus forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) for 1993-2017. These include the SPF forecasts of US 10-year Treasury rate (TBR), Moody's Aaa corporate bond rate (Aaa), CPI inflation, and real GDP growth. We show that both SPF and random walk...

The appearance of negative bond yields presents significant challenges for the fixed income markets, which mainly concern related forecasting models. The Nelson-Siegel-Svensson model (NSS) is one of the models that is most frequently used by central banks to estimate the term structure of...

Understanding the monetary policy transmission mechanism is pivotal for the design of an effective monetary policy. In this regard, the coexistence of interest rate and cost channel of monetary policy has raised important implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article estimates a...

Risk premium plays an important role in stock investing. Experiments have shown that value stocks typically have a higher average return than growth stocks; however, this effect persists indefinitely, even disappearing in some stages. Some studies suggested high volatility in the series of...

In Kenya, very little research has been carried out on the topic of the informal sector. This paper estimates the size of the Kenyan informal sector for the period 1970-2018. In light of our analysis of the stationary properties of the data, which suggests a mixture of I(0) and I(1) variables,...

We use a previously unexploited consensus survey data set to compare accuracy, unbiasedness and efficiency of Current Account growth forecasts between two panels of 25 developed and 18 developing countries following the methodologies in the existing literature. Forecast errors are bigger for the...

We adopt an unobserved components time series model to track the business cycles in the G7 countries using the Industrial production index over the period from 1:1961 to 8:2017. The advantage of adopting the industrial production series frequency is that the business cycle can be investigated in...

In this paper, we develop and simulate an RBC model that includes intangible capital as a third factor of production. We study the effects of intra-temporal preference shocks on economic aggregates, employing the undetermined coefficient method of to solve the model. Impulse response functions...

The cyclical variation behavior of the mortgage spread has motivated some studies to investigate its relationship to economic activity. Indeed, recent empirical findings indicate that the mortgage spread is a determinant/predictor of economic activity. We define the mortgage spread as the...