There is ample empirical evidence in the literature for the positive effect of central bank transparency on the economy. The main channel is that transparency reduces the uncertainty regarding future monetary policy and thereby it helps agents to make better investment, and saving decisions. In...

In the context of multilevel longitudinal data, where sample units are collected in clusters, an important aspect that should be accounted for is the unobserved heterogeneity between sample units and between clusters. For this aim we propose an approach based on nested hidden (latent) Markov...

We develop a recursion for hidden Markov model of any order h, which allows us to obtain the posterior distribution of the latent state at every occasion, given the previous h states and the observed data. With respect to the well-known Baum-Welch recursions, the proposed recursion has the...

This paper studies the dynamics of housing returns in Singapore. We first extract the movements of Singapore's economic aggregates that are free from foreign (U.S. and rest of the world) factors, and then examine the determinants of its housing returns. We find that both the domestic variables...

In this paper we propose a novel goodness-of-fit testing scheme for regime-switching models. We consider models with an observable, as well as, a latent state process. The test is based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov supremum-distance statistic and the concept of the weighted empirical distribution...

In this paper we propose a new goodness-of-fit testing scheme for the marginal distribution of regime-switching models. We consider models with an observable (like threshold autoregressions), as well as, a latent state process (like Markov regime-switching). The test is based on the...

In order to capture observed asymmetric dependence in international financial returns, we construct a multivariate regime-switching model of copulas. We model dependence with one Gaussian and one canonical vine copula regime. Canonical vines are constructed from bivariate conditional copulas and...

We calibrate Markov regime-switching (MRS) models to mean daily spot prices from the EEX market. Our empirical study shows that (i) models with shifted spike regime distributions lead to more realistic models of electricity spot prices and that (ii) introducing heteroskedasticity in the base...

We document the development of the major international banks since the late nineties, analysing balance sheet data for 27 large and complex financial institutions. We argue that balance sheet expansion and business line diversification paved the way to the rise of the universal banking model....

This paper analyzes the problems of creating and expanding national macroeconomic policy space and economic governance. It develops a critical constructivist evolutionary theory of international financial institutions and arrangements within a framework of dynamic complex adaptive economic...