Housing starts and building permits data are commonly used as leading indicators of economic activity. In British Columbia, all new homes must be registered with the Homeowner Protection Office, a branch of BC Housing, before the issuance of building permits and the start of construction. Data...

Since the Great Recession in 2007-09, U.S. real GDP has failed to return to its previously projected path, a phenomenon widely associated with secular stagnation. We investigate whether this stagnation was due to hysteresis effects from the Great Recession, a persistent negative output gap...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

This paper discusses identification, specification, estimation and forecasting for a general class of periodic unobserved components time series models with stochastic trend, seasonal and cycle components. Convenient state space formulations are introduced for exact maximum likelihood...

This paper discusses identification, specification, estimation and forecasting for a general class of periodic unobserved components time series models with stochastic trend, seasonal and cycle components. Convenient state space formulations are introduced for exact maximum likelihood...

This paper quantifies how variation in real economic activity and inflation in the U.S. influenced the market prices of level, slope, and curvature risks in U.S. Treasury markets. We develop a novel arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model in which bond investment decisions are influenced by...

To match the NBER business cycle features it is necessary to employ Generalised Dynamic Categorical (GDC) models that impose certain phase restrictions and permit multiple indexes. Theory suggests additional shape restrictions in the form of monotonicity and boundedness of certain transition...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

The debate on the forecasting ability in economics of non-linear models has a long history, and the Great Recession provides us with an opportunity for a re-assessment of the forecasting performance of several classes of non-linear models, widely used in applied macroeconomic research. In this...

Asymmetry has been well documented in the business cycle literature. The asymmetric business cycle suggests that major macroeconomic series, such as a country's unemployment rate, are non-linear and, therefore, the use of linear models to explain their behavior and forecast their future values...