What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

Models based on economic theory have serious problems at forecasting exchange rates better than simple univariate driftless random walk models, especially at short horizons. Multivariate time series models suffer from the same problem. In this paper, we propose to forecast exchange rates with a...

The existing literature exhibits high uncertainty over the theoretical and empirical determinants of private world saving. This paper reports new evidence on the drivers of private saving by applying Bayesian techniques, using data from the world's 35 largest economies in the period 1980-2012....

This paper applies a Bayesian model averaging algorithm to systematically evaluate the “law matters” literature and finds that the positive cross-country relationship between anti-self-dealing rules and stock market development proposed by Djankov, La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Sheifer...

This paper estimates determinants of long-run growth rates of GDP per capita in a cross section of countries. We propose a novel Measurement Error Model Averaging (MEMA) approach that accounts for measurement error in international income data as well as model uncertainty. Estimating the model...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasting via a computational Bayesian framework is considered. A range of parametric models are compared, including standard, threshold nonlinear and Markov switching GARCH specifications, plus standard and nonlinear stochastic volatility models, most considering four...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

This paper aims to study the determinants of corruption by examining specificities relating to the region and the level of economic development. Starting from a cross-sectional study on 130 countries, we rely on the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach to address the issue of model...

Conceptual and applied studies assessing the linkage between economic freedom and corruption expect that economic freedom boosts economic growth, improves income, and reduces levels of corruption. However, most of them have concentrated on developed and developing groups, while the Association...