This article contributes to understanding the performance of various unobserved components (UC) models in fitting Barbados’ real GDP. Relying on recent UC models techniques, it finds support for the UC model that captures correlated disturbances, but not for the model that does not. The best...

A number of recent papers have concluded that stochastic volatility plays a prominent role in describing the business cycle, particularly for the characterization of monetary policy. The impact of including stochastic volatility in DSGE models remains, however, unexplored. This paper therefore...

This paper studies the properties of the Bayesian approach to estimation and comparison of dynamic equilibrium economies. Both tasks can be performed even if the models are nonnested, misspecified, and nonlinear. First, we show that Bayesian methods have a classical interpretation:...

This paper studies the properties of the Bayesian approach to estimation and comparison of dynamic equilibrium economies. Both tasks can be performed even if the models are nonnested, misspecified, and nonlinear. First, the authors show that Bayesian methods have a classical interpretation:...

This paper estimates and compares four versions of the New Keynesian model with nominal rigidities using a Bayesian approach. Our empirical results are as follows. First, the authors find that adding price indexation improves the fit of Calvo's (1983) model. Second, models with both staggered...

Duration dependent Markov-switching VAR (DDMS-VAR) models are time series models with data generating process consisting in a mixture of two VAR processes. The switching between the two VAR processes is governed by a two state Markov chain with transition probabilities that depend on how long...

This paper sets up a Gibbs sampler for a three state Markov switching model with non-constant transition probabilities. The step from two to three states is accomplished by the use of a multinomial probit model for the latent variable process. The algorithm is then applied to Swiss GDP data in...

This paper develops a new non-linear model to analyse the business cycle by exploiting the relationship between the asymmetrical behaviour of the cycle and leading indicators. The model proposed is an innovations form of the structural model underlying simple exponential smoothing that is...

We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...