Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff’s “remarkable consensus” of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These half-life estimates, however, are based on estimates from regressions where the resulting unit root test has low power. We...

Skilled attendance at childbirth is crucial for decreasing maternal and neonatal mortality, yet many women in low- and middle-income countries deliver outside of health facilities, without skilled help. Distance to health facility is considered to be an important non-monetary barrier that impede...

In this paper, we investigate the nature of structural breaks in inflation by estimating a version of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in the presence of a unit root in inflation. We show that, with a unit root in inflation, the NKPC implies an unobserved components model that consists of...

In the case of a flat prior, a conventional wisdom is that Bayesian inference may not be very different from classical inference, as the likelihood dominates the posterior density. This paper shows that there are cases in which this conventional wisdom does not apply. An ARMA model of real GDP...

One goal of this paper is to develop an efficient Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating an ARMA model with a regime-switching mean, based on a multi-move sampler. Unlike the existing algorithm of Billio et al. (1999) based on a single-move sampler, our algorithm can achieve...