This paper proposes a method of deriving a hospital quality performance indicator using mortality outcome measures. The method aggregates any number of mortality outcome measures observed over several years into a single indicator. We begin with the supposition that there exists an abstract...

This paper uses a time-varying error correction model to examine the structural changes in the rate of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium and the cointegrating vector of the US short- and long-term interest rates. We show that agents’ expectations of interest rate movements vary according...

This paper provides a Bayesian approach to inference on a multi-state latent factor intensity model to manage the problem of highly analytically intractable pdfs. The sampling algorithm used to obtain posterior distributions of the model parameters includes a particle filter step and a...

This paper applies a multi-state latent factor intensity model to worker flows to obtain insights about the determinants of entry and exit rates pertaining to various labour market states. The analysis shows that one activity factor underpins the decision to move from employment and from...

This paper examines whether the disaggregation of consumer sentiment data into its sub-components improves the real-time capacity to forecast GDP and consumption. A Bayesian error correction approach augmented with the consumer sentiment index and permutations of the consumer sentiment...

This paper examines the forecasting qualities of Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) over a set of single factor models of short-term interest rates. Using weekly and high frequency data for the one-month Eurodollar rate, BMA produces predictive likelihoods that are considerably better than the...

This paper proposes a framework to construct indexes of activity which links two strands of the index literature – the traditional business cycle analysis and the latent variable approach. To illustrate the method, we apply the framework to Australian regional data, namely to two resource-rich...

This paper tests for the presence of nonlinear dynamics in selected Asian short rates and employs a regime varying unit root test to detect non-stationarity for distinct regimes. Nonlinearities in the form of Markov-switching dynamics are found in all short rates sample. The mean-reverting...

This paper investigates the forecasting performance of the diffusion index approach for the Australian economy, and considers the forecasting performance of the diffusion index approach relative to composite forecasts. Weighted and unweighted factor forecasts are benchmarked against composite...

The use of GARCH and jump models to capture asset price dynamics is ubiquitous in economics and finance literature. We show that the size of Breitung (2002) nonparametric unit root test is robust to the presence of jump and GARCH errors but not for the other standard unit root tests. The power...