Macroeconomic forecasting is not an easy task, in particular if future growth rates are forecasted in real time. This paper compares various methods to predict the growth rate of US Industrial Production (IP) and of the Composite Coincident Index (CCI) of the Conference Board, over the coming...

A key feature of many nonlinear time series models is that they allow for the possibility that the model structure experiences changes, depending on for example the state of the economy or of the financial market. A common property of these models is that it generally is not possible to fully...

Outliers and nonlinearity may easily be mistaken. This paper uses Monte Carlo methods to examine and compare the behavior of two competing specification procedures for Smooth Transition AutoRegressive [STAR] models under various different circumstances (linear and nonlinear data generating...

In this paper we investigate empirical specification of smooth transition error correction models (STECMs). These models can be used to describe linear long-run relationships between nonstationary variables where adjustment towards equilibrium is nonlinear and can depend on exogenous variables....

The interest in business cycle asymmetry has been steadily increasing over the last fifteen years. Most research has focused on the different behaviour of macroeconomic variables during expansions and contractions, which by now is well documented. Recent evidence suggests that such a two-phase...

Regime-switching models, like the smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) model are typically applied to time series of moderate length. Hence, the nonlinear features which these models intend to describe may be reflected in only a few observations. Conversely, neglected outliers in a linear...

In this paper we investigate the properties of the Lagrange Multiplier (LM) test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) in the presence of additive outliers (AO's). We show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely affected...

This paper provides new evidence on the rationality of industrial production (IP) and the producer price index (PPI). However, rather than examining preliminary and fully revised data, as is usually the practice, we examine the entire revision history for each data series. Thus, we are able to...

This paper studies the economic development process, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for a large panel of countries. We propose a methodology that identifies groups of countries (convergence clubs) that show similar GDP structures, while allowing for changes in club memberships over...

Revenue management is the practice of selecting those customers that generate the maximum revenue from a fixed and perishable capacity. Cargo revenue management differs from the well-known passenger revenue management problem by the fact that its capacity constraint is 2-dimensional, i.e. weight...