The paper introduces 'system priors', their use in Bayesian analysis of econometric time series, and provides a simple and illustrative application. System priors were devised by Andrle and Benes (2013) as a tool to incorporate prior knowledge into an economic model. Unlike priors about...

This paper uses bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification...

This paper outlines an operational approach for incorporating the impact of asset price cycles in the calculation of structural fiscal balances (SFBs). The global financial crisis demonstrated that movements in asset prices can have an important fiscal impact. Failing to account for the fiscal...

This paper considers the problem of jointly decomposing a set of time series variables into cyclical and trend components, subject to sets of stochastic linear restrictions among these cyclical and trend components. We derive a closed form solution to an ordinary problem featuring homogeneous...

This paper examines the extent to which conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behavior across countries and the inclusion of dynamics. It shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics can lead to misleading...

Imposing cointegration on a forecasting system, if cointegration is present, is believed to improve long-horizon forecasts. Contrary to this belief, at long horizons nothing is lost by ignoring cointegration when the forecasts are evaluated using standard multivariate forecast accuracy measures....

Should a closed economy open its trade to all countries or limit itself to participation in regional trade agreements (RTAs)? Based on time-series evidence for a data set for 1950-92, this paper estimates and compares the growth performance of countries that liberalized broadly and those that...

This paper identifies turning points for the U.S. business cycle using different time series. The model, a multivariate Markov-Swiching model, assumes that each series is characterized by a mixture of two normal distributions (a high and low mean) with switching determined by a common Markov...

We provide empirical evidence that deviations from uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) display significant nonlinearities, consistent with theories based on transaction costs or limits to speculation. This evidence suggests that the forward bias documented in the literature may be less...

This paper tests a model of the role of stock markets in current account dynamics, developed in a companion paper. With U.S. data, the model performs better than the same model without stock markets. An insight given by the model is that the current account might help predict future stock market...