Using the FEER approach we investigate the long-run equilibrium paths of the real effective exchange rates (REERs) of countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In an attempt to address econometric estimation uncertainty, we employ both single-country (Johansen and ARDL)...

This paper finds that the estimates of Armington elasticities (the elasticity of substitution between groups of products identified by country of origin) obtained from multilateral trade data can differ from those obtained from bilateral trade data. In particular, the former tends to be higher...

Amid increased size and complexity of the banking industry, operational risk has a greater potential to transpire in more harmful ways than many other sources of risk. This paper provides a succinct overview of the current regulatory framework of operational risk under the New Basel Capital...

In classical Bayesian inference the prior is treated as fixed, it is asymptotically negligible,thus any information contained in the prior is ignored from the asymptotic first order result.However, in practice often an informative prior is summarized from previous similar or the samekind of...

We develop monthly indicators for tracking growth in 32 advanced and emerging-market economies. We test the historical performance of our indicators and find that they do a good job at describing the business cycle. In a recursive out-of-sample forecasting exercise, we find that the indicators...

We adopt an `epistemic' interpretation of social decisions: there is an objectively correct choice, each voter receives a `noisy signal' of the correct choice, and the social objective is to aggregate these signals to make the best possible guess about the correct choice. One epistemic method is...

Macroeconomic policy decisions in real-time are based the assessment of current and future economic conditions. These assessments are made difficult by the presence of incomplete and noisy data. The problem is more acute for emerging market economies, where most economic data are released...

El uso del método de máxima verosimilitud para estimar modelos de producción Half-Normal con frontera estocástica conlleva algunas dificultades prácticas que tal vez no han sido suficientemente enfatizadas. Usando el software FRONTIER, analizamos el caso en que la estimación sugiere la...

Awell-known result in the Bayesian inventory management literature is: If lost sales are not observed, the Bayesian optimal inventory level is larger than the myopic inventory level (one should "stock more" to learn about the demand distribution). This result has been proven in other studies...