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...

A landmark result in the optimal monetary policy design literature is that fundamental-based interest rate rules invariably lead to rational expectations equilibria (REE) that are not stable under adaptive learning. In this paper, we make a novel information assumption that private agents cannot...

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...

Notwithstanding high unemployment following the Great Recession, inflation in the United States has been remarkably stable. We find that a traditional Phillips curve describes the behavior of inflation reasonably well since the 1960s. Using a non-linear Kalman filter that allows for time-varying...

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 use a threshold vector autoregression to study the effects of monetary policy shocks on the US. Depending on the level of inflation we note important regime dependence in the inflation response to monetary policy shocks.

This note presents a simple method for estimating the state vector of linearized DSGE models without using the Kalman filter. The conditional covariance matrix of the state vector is also derived. The method can easily cope with filtered data, and with arbitrary patterns of missing observations.

This study shows that China’s Consumer Expectation Index contains useful information about pure expectation shocks, which are unrelated to economic fundamentals. It turns out that such shocks are likely to be an important independent driver of industrial output growth.