In this paper, we analyse Okun's law - a relation between the change in the unemployment rate and GDP growth - using data from Australia, the euro area, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we assess the relevance of non-Gaussianity when modelling the relation. This is...

Exchange rates have raised the ire of economists for more than 20 years. The problem is that few, if any, exchange rate models are known to systematically beat a naive random walk in out of sample forecasts. Engel and West (2005) show that these failures can be explained by the standard-present...

Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are that they are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changes are predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whether these two features of the data may in fact be...

The U.S. prewar output series exhibit smaller shock-persistence than postwar-series. Some studies suggest this may be due to linear interpolation used to generate missing prewar data. Monte Carlo simulations that support this view generate large standard-errors, making such inference imprecise....

To analyze whether stock-market prices follow a random walk, the algebraic sign of their returns has been compared with a coin toss, which is a prominent example for a Bernoulli trial with equiprobable outcomes. Like coin tosses, signed returns lend themselves for a simple runs test for...

Although macroeconomic forecasting forms an integral part of the policymaking process, there has been a serious lack of rigorous and systematic research in the evaluation of out-of-sample modelbased forecasts of China's real gross domestic product (GDP) growth and consumer price index inflation....

Using parametric return autocorrelation tests and non parametric variance ratio statistics show that the UK and US short-term interest rates are unit root processes with significant mean reverting components. Congruent with this empirical evidence, we develop a new continuous time term structure...

We examine the relative predictive power of the sticky price monetary model, uncovered interest parity, and a transformation of the net exports variable. In addition to bringing a new approach (utilizing our measure of external imbalance suggested by Gourinchas and Rey) and data spanning a more...