In this paper we propose a chi-square test for identification. Our proposed test statistic is based on the distance between two shrinkage extremum estimators. The two estimators converge in probability to the same limit when identification is strong, and their asymptotic distributions are...

The goal of this paper is to develop formal techniques for analyzing the relative in-sample performance of two competing, misspeci?ed models in the presence of possible data instability. The central idea of our methodology is to propose a measure of the models? local relative performance: the...

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...

This paper analyzes the importance of monetary and fiscal policy shocks in explaining US macroeconomic fluctuations, and establishes new stylized facts. The novelty of our empirical analysis is that we jointly consider both monetary and fiscal policy, whereas the existing literature only focuses...

This paper investigates whether oil price shocks have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S Dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies and clean data, we …find paradoxically little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange...

The forecasting literature has identi…fied two important, broad issues. The fi…rst stylized fact is that the predictive content is unstable over time; the second is that in-sample predictive content does not necessarily translate into out-of-sample predictive ability, nor ensures the stability...

This paper proposes forecast optimality tests that can be used in unstable environments. They include tests for forecast unbiasedness, efficiency, encompassing, serial uncorrelation, and, in general, regression-based tests of forecasting ability. The proposed tests are applied to evaluate the...

This paper is a comprehensive comparison of existing methods for constructing confidence bands for univariate impulse response functions in the presence of high persistence. Monte Carlo results show that Kilian (1998a), Wright (2000), Gospodinov (2004) and Pesavento and Rossi (2005) have...

The objective of this paper is to identify which parameters of a model are stable over time. Existing procedures can only be used to test whether a given subset of parameters is stable, and cannot be used to find which subset of parameters is stable. We propose a new procedure that is...

A well-known puzzle in the international finance literature is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models (Meese and Rogoff, 1983a, b and 1988). This paper offers a potential explanation for this finding. When exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent,...