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

Long run neutrality restrictions have been widely used to identify structural shocks in VAR models. This paper revisits the seminal paper by Blanchard and Quah (1989), and investigates their identification scheme. We use structural VAR models with smoothly changing covariances for identification...

Numerous papers have tried to understand housing’s role in the economy and have not reached an agreement. In this paper we turn to the asymmetric relationship between housing and the overall economic activity. We find that the relation between building permits and GDP is regime-dependent....