We test two questions: (i) Is the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) more parsimonious than Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)?, and (ii) Is BIC better than AIC for forecasting purposes? By using simulated data, we provide statistical inference of both hypotheses individually and then jointly...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

There is a vast literature that specifies Bayesian shrinkage priors for vector autoregressions (VARs) of possibly large dimensions. In this paper I argue that many of these priors are not appropriate for multi-country settings, which motivates me to develop priors for panel VARs (PVARs). The...

The liquidity problems that appeared on the interbank money markets during the financial crisis caused an increased volatility of the interbank interest rates, especially after September 2008. Banking institutions from the Euro zone have avoided the mutual funding, which resulted in a reduction...

One can analyze and forecast the inflationary potential in the Puerto Rican economy using the “P* model.” Given the nature of the monetary sector in Puerto Rico (PR), the model is put into the context of variables from the mainland United States (US). The results indicate a long-run...

The study aims to calculate Egypt’s real effective exchange rate at both the bilateral and multilateral levels, estimates the effect of real cross-rate movements on trade in goods and services and on foreign direct investment, and determines the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate for...

During the Great Moderation, borrowing by the U.S. nonfinancial sector structurally exceeded GDP growth. Using flow-of-fund data, we test the hypothesis that this measure of debt buildup was leading to lower output volatility. We estimate univariate GARCH models in order to obtain estimates for...

This paper extends the Nelson-Siegel linear factor model by developing a flexible macro-finance framework for modeling and forecasting the term structure of US interest rates. Our approach is robust to parameter uncertainty and structural change, as we consider instabilities in parameters and...

Many financial studies are based on the efficient capital markets hypothesis. In this context, testing the existence of this concept becomes an interesting field of study for the emerging capital market. The aim of this paper is to enlighten the difficulties of portfolio construction in a...