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...

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

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or 'catching up with the Joneses', see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...

One popular approach for nonstructural economic and financial forecasting is to include a large number of economic and financial variables, which has been shown to lead to significant improvements for forecasting, for example, by the dynamic factor models. A challenging issue is to determine...

In this paper we investigate transmission and spillovers of local and foreign economic policy uncertainty shocks to unemployment in two largest economic regions in the world - the United States (US) and the Euro area (EA). For this purpose we deploy Bayesian Markov-switching structural vector...

The catching up process in Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland is analyzed by investigating the integration properties of log-differences in per-capita GDP versus the EU15 and a Mediterranean country group. We account for structural changes by using unit root tests that allow for two endogenous...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...

We propose a general class of Markov-switching-ARFIMA processes in order to combine strands of long memory and Markov-switching literature. Although the coverage of this class of models is broad, we show that these models can be easily estimated with the DLV algorithm proposed. This algorithm...

In this paper, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art in the econometric literature on the modeling of so-called financial point processes. The latter are associated with the random arrival of specific financial trading events, such as transactions, quote updates, limit orders or price...

This paper concerns goodness-of-fit test for semiparametric copula models. Our contribution is two-fold: we first propose a new test constructed via the comparison between "in-sample" and "out-of-sample" pseudolikelihoods, which avoids the use of any probability integral transformations. Under...