Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision mak- ing process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up{ or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

Estimating natural rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is important for understanding the joint dynamics of unemployment, in ation, and in Nation expectation. However, existing literature falls short in endogenizing inflation expectation together with NAIRU in a model consistent way. We develop and...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

In this note we establish the existence of the first two moments of the asymptotic trace statistic, which appears as weak limit of the likelihood ratio statistic for testing the cointe- gration rank in a vector autoregressive model and whose moments may be used to develop panel cointegration...

Motivated by the recurrent Neural Networks, this paper proposes a recurrent Support Vector Regression (SVR) procedure to forecast nonlinear ARMA model based simulated data and real data of financial returns. The forecasting ability of the recurrent SVR is compared with three competing methods,...

We introduce a nonlinear infinite moving average as an alternative to the standard state-space policy function for solving nonlinear DSGE models. Perturbation of the nonlinear moving average policy function provides a direct mapping from a history of innovations to endogenous variables,...

We prove that standard regularity and saddle stability assumptions for linear approximations are sufficient to guarantee the existence of a unique solution for all undetermined coefficients of nonlinear perturbations of arbitrary order to discrete time DSGE models. We derive the perturbation...

I construct risk-corrected approximations of the policy functions of DSGEmodels around the stochastic steady state and ergodic mean that are linear in the state variables. The resulting approximations are uniformly more accurate than standard linear approximations and capture the dynamics of...

This paper investigates to what extent the fundamentals of the real economy are re ected in the stock prices of Japan. A Markov switching VAR model with switching variances is used to test the structural identi cation scheme. Identification of fundamental and nonfundamental shocks is shown to be...