Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

This paper provides evidence that most German states (Laender) have unsustainable public finances by exploiting a newly compiled database covering the years 1950‐2011. Although the Laender are closely intertwined we are the first to apply “second generation” panel techniques that control...

Thanks to various Fourier DF unit root tests, time-varying fiscal reaction functions and threshold regressions, this study examines the stationarity and the sustainability of public finance for six industrial countries over the period spanning from 1870 to 2017. Longer-run debt sustainability is...

An n-variable structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) can be identified (up to shock order) from the evolution of the residual covariance across time if the structural shocks exhibit heteroskedasticity (Rigobon (2003), Sentana and Fiorentini (2001)). However, the path of residual covariances is...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on economic growth in the presence of fiscal consolidation in South Africa. Markov-switching dynamic regression (MSDR) and time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) were performed using time series data from 1994 to...

This paper elaborates on the alternative measure of persistence recently suggested in Marques (2004), which is based on the idea of mean reversion. A formal distinction between the "unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t" and its estimator, is made clear...

In this paper the long-run trend in RPI inflation (core inflation) for the UK over the 1961-1997 period is estimated within the framework of a multivariate common trends model which extends the bivariate VAR approach of Quah and Vahey (1995). In this context core inflation is directly linked to...