We search through all possible consumer confidence indicators in order to find the single indicator that has the highest correlation with private consumption growth. Moreover, we contrast this indicator to the Consumer Confidence Indicator used by the European Commission, and some alternative...

We outline a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with trend extrapolation in asset pricing that we fit to quarterly U.S. macroeconomic time series with Bayesian techniques. To be more precise, we modify the DSGE model in Smets and Wouters (2007) by incorporating asset traders who...

The central finding of the recent structural vector autoregression (SVAR) literature with a differenced specification of hours is that technology shocks lead to a fall in hours. Researchers have used this finding to argue that real business cycle models are unpromising. We subject this SVAR...

A large literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. In order to explain these differences, we define the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic announcement as its ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation and the federal funds target rate. We then...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

We build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with five sectors (1 - mining; 2 - manufacturing; 3 - electricity, gas and water; 4 - trade, transport and communication; 5 - other). The model is estimated on 29 time-series of Russia statistical data. We analyse the out-of-sample...

This paper investigates the properties of distortions that manifest themselves as wedges in the equilibrium conditions of the neoclassical growth model across a sample of OECD countries for the 1970-2011 period. The quantitative relevance of each wedge and its robustness in generating...

La evidencia empírica para Colombia muestra relaciones tanto positivas como negativas entre el crecimiento del producto y el empleo, a diferencia de loencontrado en economías desarrolladas como la de los Estados Unidos. El presente trabajo usa modelos VAR para abordar explicaciones de ese...

We use the results of business tendency surveys (BTS) to forecast private investment growth in Peru, exploring the possible non-linear link between the BTS and private investment for forecasting purposes. We find that business confidence indices extracted from BTS, in particular the one...

This paper investigates the properties of distortions that manifest themselves as wedges in the equilibrium conditions of the neoclassical growth model across a sample of OECD countries for the 1970-2011 period. The quantitative relevance of each wedge and its robustness in generating...