Economic growth tends to stimulate fundamental changes in consumption patterns as consumers who get rich tend to spread their spending more evenly across a wider variety of goods and services. Comparing cross sectional spending patterns across rich and poor countries, we investigate how this...

The identification of a VAR requires differentiating between correlation and causation. This paper presents a method to deal with this problem. Graphical models, which provide a rigorous language to analyze the statistical and logical properties of causal relations, associate a particular set of...

This paper addresses the problem of finding the appropriate method for conducting empirical validation in agent-based (AB) models, which is often regarded as the Achilles’ heel of the AB approach to economic modelling. The paper has two objectives. First, to identify key issues facing AB...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...

This study investigates the effects of a monetary policy shock on real output and prices, by means of a novel distribution-free nonrecursive identification scheme for structural vector autoregressions. Structural shocks are assumed to be mutually independent. The identification procedure is...

This paper proposes a new method for empirically validate simulation models that generate artificial time series data comparable with real-world data. The approach is based on comparing structures of vector autoregression models which are estimated from both artificial and real-world data by...

In this paper we present a semi-automated search procedure to deal with the problem of the identification of the causal structure related to a vector autoregressive model. The structural form of the model is described by a directed graph and from the analysis of the partial correlations of the...

Improving energy efficiency is often considered to be one of the keys to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, efficiency gains also reduce the cost of energy services and may even reduce the price of energy, resulting in energy use rebounding and potential energy use savings being eaten...

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a statistical method that transforms a set of random variables in least dependent linear combinations. Under the assumption that the observed data are mixtures of non-Gaussian and independent processes, ICA is able to recover the underlying components, but...