We argue that the behavior of manufacturing inventories provides evidence against models of business cycle fluctuations based on productivity shocks, increasing returns to scale, or favorable externalities, whereas it is consistent with models with short-run diminishing returns and procyclical...

This Paper estimates output gaps for Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, employing the HP filter and unobservable-components (UC) techniques. The latter approach assumes that actual output is the sum of potential output, which follows a random walk with a time-varying drift,...

In this Paper we evaluate the relative performance of linear, non-linear and time-varying models for about 500 macroeconomic variables for the countries in the Euro area, using a real-time forecasting methodology. It turns out that linear models work well for about 35% of the series under...

It is rather common to have several competing forecasts for the same variable, and many methods have been suggested to pick up the best, on the basis of their past forecasting performance. As an alternative, the forecasts can be combined to obtain a pooled forecast, and several options are...

This paper examines the distribution of output around capacity when money demand is a non-linear function of the nominal interest rate such that nominal interest rates cannot become negative. When fluctuations in output result primarily from disturbances to the money market, the variance of...

The recent studies by Blanchard (2004) and Favero and Giavazzi (2004) imply that a tight monetary policy consistent with an inflation-targeting framework in emerging market economies could actually increase the price level due to the lack of fiscal discipline and the associated high risk...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between average inflation and inflation uncertainty in Paraguay from 1965 to 1999. Several AR-GARCH models are used to generate the conditional mean, as well as the conditional variance of the inflation

This article studies the features of co-movements of prices and production between six CEECs recently joined the EU and the euro zone. More precisely, based partially on the methodology suggested by Alesina, Barro and Tenreyro [2002], we evaluate the size and the persistence of prices and...