Arguing that crises are similar if they are predictable from historical experience, we employ panel logit models to examine similarities in the run-ups to the current global financial crisis and historical banking crises. Asset bubbles are the most common precursors.

This paper proposes a couple of new methods to compute the news impact curve for stochastic volatility (SV) models. The new methods incorporate the joint movement of return and volatility, which has been ignored by the extant literature. The first method employs the Bayesian Markov chain Monte...

The average of periodic growth rates is a downwardly biased estimator of the rate of growth of a country. The higher the variance of the periodical growth rates, the higher the downward bias. The longer the business cycle, the higher the downward bias. In this short paper, we demonstrate these...

Klein (2000) advocates the use of the Schur decomposition of a matrix pencil to solve linear rational expectations models. Meanwhile his algorithm has become a center piece in several computer codes that provide approximate solutions to (non-linear) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models....

This paper examines the role of habit formation in a standard state-dependent pricing (SDP) model. Incorporating habit formation helps the SDP model to generate hump-shaped and more persistent output responses under a monetary shock. More importantly, incorporating habit formation causes...

A maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform is used to obtain time scale decompositions of economic forecasts and their errors. The generated time scale components can be used in loss measures and tests for comparing forecast accuracy to evaluate whether the forecasts accurately capture the...

We compare forecasts from different adaptive learning algorithms and calibrations applied to US real-time data on inflation and growth. We find that the Least Squares with constant gains adjusted to match (past) survey forecasts provides the best overall performance both in terms of forecasting...

Using a dynamic multivariate system, where variables are aligned in order to reflect data availability at the time when agents form their expectations, we show that survey expectations contain relevant information about business cycle developments in the euro area.

This paper suggests using a unit t-value criterion in imposing restrictions on lags to formulate a subset vector autoregressive (VAR) model for the purpose of point forecasts. Among any other alternative models nested to the initial VAR model, this less restrictive modeling strategy produces the...

We develop a simple approach to identify economic news and monetary shocks at a high frequency. The approach is used to examine financial market developments in the United States following the Federal Reserve’s May 22, 2013 taper talk suggesting that it would begin winding down its...