The Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes a prominent example of a long-lasting political conflict which has major consequences for the livelihoods of the people on both sides. The agricultural sectors of the Palestinian and Israeli economies are tightly connected. However, various security...

We review, and extend, one of the classic dynamic models of conflict in economics by Richardson (1919) and Boulding (1962). Restrictions on parameters are relaxed to account for alliances and for peace-keeping, yielding new dynamic patterns of conflict. In addition, we explore an incrementalist...

The central limit theorem for nonparametric kernel estimates of a smooth trend, with linearly-generated errors, indicates asymptotic independence and homoscedasticity across fixed points, irrespective of whether disturbances have short memory, long memory, or antipersistence. However, the...

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...

The Global Financial Crisis established that policymakers should consider the stage of the financial cycle to better evaluate the cyclical position of the economy when designing monetary policy decisions. If financial variables are omitted from the estimations of the output gap, a common and...

Determining potential output and the output gap-two inherently unobservable variables-is a major challenge for macroeconomists. This paper presents the R package sectorgap, which features a flexible modeling and estimation framework for a multivariate Bayesian state space model identifying...

We propose a multivariate Bayesian state space model to identify potential growth and the output gap consistent with the dynamics of the underlying production sectors of the economy and those of inflation and the labor market. Our approach allows us to decompose economic fluctuations and...