The paper describes a global model consisting of several industrial and developing country blocks built to analyze alternative economic policies in a medium-term context. The model, which has been used to construct medium-term scenarios for the World Economic Outlook, consists of aggregate...

The paper proposes an algorithm that uses forecast encompassing tests for combining forecasts. The algorithm excludes a forecast from the combination if it is encompassed by another forecast. To assess the usefulness of this approach, an extensive empirical analysis is undertaken using a U.S....

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was...

The global financial crisis highlighted that the financial system can be most vulnerable when it seems most stable. This paper models non-linear dynamics in banking. Small shocks can lead from an equilibrium with few bank defaults straight to a full freeze. The mechanism is based on...

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...

The paper argues that assets produced under build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) schemes-under which public infrastructure assets are legally owned and operated for a defined period by the private corporation that constructs them, before being transferred to the government- should be treated in...

The 2005 International Comparison Program''s (ICP) estimates of economy-wide purchasing power parity (PPP) are based on parity estimates for 155 basic expenditure headings, mainly estimated using country product dummy (CPD) regressions. The estimates are potentially inefficient and open to...

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 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...