Economic forecasts and policy decisions are often informed by empirical analysis based on econometric models. However, inference based upon a single model, when several viable models exist, limits its usefulness. Taking account of model uncertainty, a Bayesian model averaging procedure is...

The paper describes the version (2012) of the Romanian economic macromodel2. The model has been constructed taking into account the important consequences induced by the integration of the country into the European Union and by the world crisis. Some supplementary requests of the government...

There has been much interest of late regarding the current commodity “super cycle”. However, even sizing the current boom implies knowledge of long-run trends that are notoriously difficult to estimate. This paper uses new techniques to identify breaks in commodity prices and estimate trends...

The 2007–2008 US subprime mortgage crisis evolved into a financial crisis that negatively affected many economies in the world and was afterwards widely referred to as the global financial crisis. Since the beginning of this financial crisis of 2008–2009, South Africa experienced a...

We estimate the long-term impact of social security and social protection spending in a set of twelve EU countries. We estimate country-specific VARs relating GDP, unemployment, savings, and social spending. We find that social spending has a negative effect in most countries while the effects...

The consistent ranking of multivariate volatility models by means of statistical loss function is a challenging research field, because it concerns the quality of the proxy chosen to replace the unobserved volatility, the set of competing models to be ranked and the kind of loss function. The...

Though there is a very large literature examining whether energy use Granger causes economic output or vice versa, it is fairly inconclusive. Almost all existing studies use relatively short time series, or panels with a relatively small time dimension. We apply Granger causality and...

Time series of electricity, petroleum products, and renewables are found to be highly correlated with total energy consumption. Applying this insight to the huge literature on energy-GDP causality explains that the results of total energy-GDP causality tests frequently coincide with the results...

This paper investigates effects of a signal-to-noise ratio on finite sample inference for cointegrating vectors. The ratio is defined as a measure of the magnitude of a permanent shock relative to a transitory shock. According to Monte Carlo experiments conducted in this paper, a high...

We evaluate the Smets–Wouters New Keynesian model of the US postwar period, using indirect inference, the bootstrap and a VAR representation of the data. We find that the model is strongly rejected. While an alternative (New Classical) version of the model fares no better, adding limited...