When attempting to deal with the recalculation process, it is hard to answer the question “Does the recalculated series include economic events and seasonal behaviours in the past?”. This paper discusses some alternative backward recalculation methods and presents the applications and their...

There is no standard economic forecasting procedure that systematically outperforms the others at all horizons and with any dataset. A common way to proceed, in many contexts, is to choose the best model within a family based on a fitting criteria, and then forecast. I compare the out-of-sample...

This note provides evidence of neglected seasonality in the "seasonally adjusted" Australian national accounts

Seasonality is one of the most important features of economic time series. The possibility to abstract from seasonality for the assessment of economic conditions is a widely debated issue. In this paper we propose a strategy for assessing the role of seasonal adjustment on business cycle...

By employing a parsimonious econometric approach, based on an ARIMA model, this study detects significant Islamic calendar effects on U.S. meat consumption. This surprising finding strengthens the assumption that the size of the Muslim community is considerably larger than assumed by U.S....

It is well known among practitioners that the seasonal adjustment applied to economic time series could involve several decisions to be made by the econometrician. In this paper, I assess which aggregation strategy delivers the best results for the case of the Chilean GDP 1986-2009 quarterly...

The use of chain-linked methods reduces significantly the problem of price structure obsolescence present in fixed base environments. However, price updating introduces a new dimension that may produce confusion if not accounted for. Probably the most notorious difficulty generated by the...

This study examines the sustainability of trade deficit with allowance of structural breaks and seasonal adjustments as both variables have been subject to structural changes and affected by seasons. We find that, in all the cases, there is long run relationship between export and import. This...

Professor Becker´s 1956 paper about free banking was originally intended as a reaction to the 100-percent reserve proposals that were then popular at the University of Chicago. Today the original paper clearly illustrates how considerably our views and theories about free banking have evolved...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a very concise way of measuring fiscal stance. This procedure is based on the assumption that the ‘neutral change’ in the government budget can best be simulated with a long-term approximation of the underlying trend of total output....