It is common to transform data to stationarity, such as by differencing and demeaning, before estimating factor models in macroeconomics. Imposing these transformations, however, limit opportunities to learn about trending behaviour. Trends and deterministic processes can play a central role in...

We make use of the extant testing methodology of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2006) and Aït-Sahalia and Jacod (2009a,b,c) to examine the importance of jumps, and in particular large and small jumps, using high frequency price returns on 25 stocks in the DOW 30 and S&P futures index. In...

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this paper, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes. We...

Diffusion index models have received considerable attention from both theoreticians and empirical econometricians in recent years. One reason for this is that datasets with many variables are increasingly becoming available and being utilized for economic modelling, and another is that common...

Central banks regularly monitor select financial and macroeconomic variables in order to obtain early indication of the impact of monetary policies. This practice is discussed on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York website, for example, where one particular set of macroeconomic indicators is...

In the conduct of empirical macroeconomic research, unit root, cointegration, common cycle, and related test statistics are often constructed using logged data, even though there is often no clear reason, at least from an empirical perspective, why logs should be used rather than levels....

Employing econometric methods for univariate time series, this paper investigates the empirical validity of assuming a unit root in individuals' labor-income processes. Using a Swedish register-based longitudinal dataset which allows us to follow a cohort of workers from 1968 to 2005, we are...

The empirical literature that tests for purchasing power parity (PPP) by focusing on the stationarity of real exchange rates has so far provided, at best, mixed results. The yen real exchange rate behavior, as compared to other major currencies, has most stubornly challenged the PPP hypothesis...

This paper examines the possibility of unit roots in the presence of endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the total, female and male labour force participation rates (LFPR) for Australia, Canada and the USA. We extend the procedure of Gil-Alana (2008) for single structural break...

Recent advances in testing for the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) focus on the time series properties of real exchange rates in panel frameworks. One weakness of such tests, however, is that they fail to inform the researcher as to which cross-section units are stationary. As a...