Purpose: US policy makers have been looking at various ways to curb rising health care costs in USA, including ways to promote the use of generic drugs in lieu of brand drugs. In this broader context, the implementation of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in December 2013 will...

We investigate the effects of government expenditure on private consumption when the private sector anticipates the fiscal shocks. In order to capture anticipation of fiscal policy, we develop a new method based on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). By simulating data from a theoretical...

The paper provides probability estimates of the state of the GDP growth. A regime-switching model defines the probability of the Greek GDP being in boom or recession. Then probit models extract the predictive information of a set of explanatory (economic and financial) variables regarding the...

This paper characterizes the monetary policy in Brazil through a forward-looking Taylor-rule-type reaction function before and after the Real plan, which stabilized inflation in July 1994. The results show that the interest rate response to inflation was greater than one-to-one before...

The estimation of structural dynamic factor models (DFMs) for large sets of variables is attracting considerable attention. In this paper we briefly review the underlying theory and then compare the impulse response functions resulting from two alternative estimation methods for the DFM....

We introduce a simple nonparametric approach to compute impulse response functions. We first search for clusters of recurrent patterns of observations resembling two sets of given initial conditions, one of which contains the impact effect of the structural shock of interest. Then, to trace out...

We develop a new targeted maximum likelihood estimation method that provides improved forecasting for misspecified linear autoregressive models. The method weighs data points in the observed sample and is useful in the presence of data generating processes featuring structural breaks, complex...

This paper investigates the ability of gold to hedge worldwide risks from the perspective of global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU). By applying the full- and sub-sample rolling-window bootstrap causality tests to analyze the dynamic interaction between GEPU and gold price (GP). It can be...

We develop a similarity-based structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model using the similar clusters of data relevant for the prevailing initial macroeconomic conditions of interest. Our computationally attractive simple approach enables us to uncover time-varying effects of structural...

This paper clarifies the conditions under which the state-of-the-art approach to identifying TFP news shocks in Kurmann and Sims (2021, KS) identifies not only news shocks but also surprise shocks. We examine the ability of the KS procedure to recover responses to these shocks from data...