Applied time series research often faces the challenge that (a) potentially relevant variables are unobservable, (b) it is fundamentally uncertain which covariates are relevant. Thus cointegration is often analyzed in partial systems, ignoring potential (stationary) covariates. By simulating...

This paper proposes a test for missing at random (MAR). The MAR assumption is shown to be testable given instrumental variables which are independent of response given potential outcomes. A nonparametric testing procedure based on integrated squared distance is proposed. The statistic's...

A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypotheses. We...

We analyze Granger causality testing in a mixed-frequency VAR, where the difference in sampling frequencies of the variables is large. Given a realistic sample size, the number of high-frequency observations per low-frequency period leads to parameter proliferation problems in case we attempt to...

Using a simple sign test, we report new empirical evidence, taken from both the US and the German stock markets, showing that trading behavior substantially changed around Black Monday in 1987. It turned out that before Black Monday investors behaved more as in the momentum strategy; and after...

The goal of this paper is to test the Husted model and to inspect the long-run sustainability of Brazilian current account in a very specific period of time (1996-2005) by the use of monthly data. We have tested the inter-temporal budget constraints (IBC) condition via unit root test with...

I assess how dissenting views on appropriate monetary policy result in disagreement about the macroeconomic outlook of Federal Open Market Committee members. FOMC members that voted for a higher Fed Funds Rate than the majority of voters also forecast higher inflation rates, while they forecast...

Forecasts are useless whenever the forecast error variance fails to be smaller than the unconditional variance of the target variable. This paper develops tests for the null hypothesis that forecasts become uninformative beyond some limiting forecast horizon h. Following Diebold and Mariano (DM,...

In this paper, we construct a single composite financial stress indicator (FSI) which aims to predict developments in the real economy in the euro area. Our FSI was shown to perform better than the Euro STOXX 50 volatility index for the recent banking crisis and the euro-area sovereign debt...