The relationship between excess returns and the dividend price ratio is known to be unstable. However, there is no consensus on the type of instability, i.e. few or many breaks. Differences in parameter instability affect the long-term investor in particular, as misspecification errors are...

We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

A Bayesian model averaging procedure is presented that makes use of a finite mixture of many model structures within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. It is applied to two empirical issues. First, stability of the Great Ratios in U.S. macro-economic time series is investigated,...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

The empirical support for a real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure. This procedure makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class ofvector autoregressive (VAR) processes. The linear VAR model is extendedto...

This paper is the first attempt to assess the impact of official FOREX interventions of the three major central banks in terms of the dynamics of the currency components of the major exchange rates (EUR/USD and YEN/USD) over the period 1989-2003. We identify the currency components of the mean...

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most realexchange rates as temporary deviations from fixedlong-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibriathemselves, see Engel (2000). We implement thisidea using an unobserved components model and decompose theobservations on...