Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or variation of business cycle length) exist simultaneously. Identification of these market...

In this paper, a Bayesian version of the exponential smoothing method of forecasting is proposed. The approach is based on a state space model containing only a single source of error for each time interval. This model allows us to improve current practices surrounding exponential smoothing by...

Although the share of service sector in Côte d’Ivoire’s real GDP is higher than other sectors, it is widely recognized that the Ivorian economy is mainly based on agricultural sector and thus the fluctuations in this ‘motor’ sector could have a huge impact on the growth process of the...

This paper shows how the dynamic linear model with fixed regressors can be efficiently estimated. This dynamic model can be used to distinguish spurious correlation from state dependence and we show that the integrated likelihood estimator is adaptive for any asymptotics with T increasing where...

We show that the use of prior information derived from former empirical findings and/or subject matter theory regarding the lag structure of the observable variables together with an AR process for the error terms can produce univariate and single equation models that are intuitively appealing,...

This paper provides a novel approach to forecasting time series subject to discrete structural breaks. We propose a Bayesian estimation and prediction procedure that allows for the possibility of new breaks over the forecast horizon, taking account of the size and duration of past breaks (if...

This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last thirty years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue...

The present value model of the current account has been very popular, as it provides an optimal benchmark to which actual current account series have often been compared. We show why persistence in observed current account data makes the estimated optimal series very sensitive to small-sample...