The Bank of Italy quarterly econometric model (BIQM) is a large-scale ‘semi structural' macro-econometric model. It tries to strike the right balance between theoretical rigour and statistical fit to the data. This paper provides an update of the features and the properties of the model,...

A standard model-based trend-cycle decomposition of Italian GDP yields a likelihood function that is relatively flat and has two local maxima. A Bayesian estimation of the model identifies output gap and trend components that match the features of the Italian business cycle well. In a bivariate...

A time series model in which the signal is buried in non-Gaussian noise may throw up observations that are outliers when judged by the Gaussian yardstick. We describe an observation-driven model, based on an exponential generalized beta distribution of the second kind (EGB2), in which the signal...