This work contains three papers employing common factor methodologies to economic forecasting for Estonia. The methods employed are State-space modelling with Kalman filtering, static principal components and dynamic principal components. The last paper also investigates Inflation dynamics and...

We propose the relaxation algorithm as a simple and powerful method for simulating the transition process in growth models. This method has a number of important advantages: First, it can easily deal with a wide range of dynamic systems including stiff differential equations and systems giving...

This book contributes to the literature on the determinants of macro volatility. It starts with a theoretical examination using a stochastic model of endogenous growth and fluctuations. In this setup, an analytical measure of macro volatility based on cyclical components is derived. The measure...

The concept of trade openness is broadly applied as a potential predictor in numerous empirical studies, despite the fact that no commonly accepted approach of measuring openness has been developed. The most widely applied (‘traditional’) openness indices are not able to accurately calculate...

Financial market developments have become increasingly important to the overall economic development in virtually all countries in the world over the past three decades or so. The arti-cles collected in this Thesis constitute an attempt to explore this ‘financialisation hypothesis’ from a...

While the relationship between volatility and risk is central to much of thefinancial literature it has not been incorporated systematically into assessment ofsovereign debt sustainability. This paper attempts to fill this gap by studying how the probability distribution of sovereign debt to GDP...

This paper extends Galí and Gertler’s (1999) new hybrid KeynesianPhillips curve to the open economy context. We hypothesise that pricing decisionsdepend on both labour costs and intermediate imported input prices. The results forHong Kong are consistent with the theory if import prices are...

While empirical evidence nds only a weak relationship between nominal exchangerates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute ex-change rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, how-ever, appear to change over time and some variable...

We establish an empirical link between the ex-ante uncertainty about macroeconomic fundamentals and the ex-post resolution of this uncertainty in financial markets. We measure macroeconomic uncertainty using prices of economic derivatives and relate this measure to changes in implied...