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....

The technique of using densities and conditional distributions to carry out consistent specification testing and model selection amongst multiple diffusion processes have received considerable attention from both financial theoreticians and empirical econometricians over the last two decades....