Macroeconomic practitioners frequently work with multivariate time series models such as VARs, factor augmented VARs as well as time-varying parameter versions of these models (including variants with multivariate stochastic volatility). These models have a large number of parameters and, thus,...

This study investigated the extent to which climate variability (proxied by rainfall variability) and macroeconomic policies influenced food crop output in Nigeria. It used time series data obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria and National Bureau of Statistics (1978-2009). Four functional forms...

One of the main topics of macroeconomics analysis is to assess the causes and transmission of business cycles. In order to address this issue, macroeconomists have analysed the response of output to different types of shocks. However, since a shock is by definition an unobserved variable, there...

The topic of economic growth and convergence of countries has been an active topic in the 1990's. This paper investigates the question of whether there is any empirical evidence that countries are converging, with respect to their relative incomes, over time. To test for convergence, the...

This paper aims to conduct a precise test of the political economy hypothesis linking income inequality and economic growth. By choosing covariates from a detailed county-level dataset and assuming that U.S. counties experience perfect capital mobility, I shut off the four possible channels...