It is well-known that outliers exist in the type of multivariate data used by financial practitioners for portfolio construction and risk management. Typically, outliers are addressed prior to model fitting by applying some combination of trimming and/or Winsorization to each individual...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...

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...

The preliminary evidence in the literature suggests that changes in uncertainty have a role in shaping the U.S. economic cycle. But what is effectively measured by the different available indicators of uncertainty still remains an "uncertain" issue. This paper has two aims: (i) to introduce a...

The preliminary evidence in the literature suggests that changes in uncertainty have a role in shaping the U.S. economic cycle. But what is effectively measured by the different available indicators of uncertainty still remains an "uncertain" issue. This paper has two aims: (i) to introduce a...

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higherorder risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MS-VAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

In this paper we analyze the impact of uncertainty shocks on the Brazilian economy. We use a general equilibrium model in such a way that the transmission channels of the shocks could be identified and we solve the model using a third order approximation for the policy functions since lower...