This paper is written by authors from technical and economic fields, motivated to find a common language and views on the problem of the optimal use of information in model estimation. The center of our interest is the natural condition of control -- a common assumption in the Bayesian...

This paper considers a model with financial frictions and studies the role of expectations and unconventional monetary policy response to financial crises. During a financial crisis, the financial sector has reduced ability to provide credit to productive firms, and the central bank may help...

Many American communities seek to attract or retain businesses with tax abatements, tax credits, or tax increment financing of infrastructure projects (TIFs). The evidence for 1999 indicates that communities are most likely to offer one or more of these business development incentives if their...

Economic data are collected at various frequencies but econometric estimation typically uses the coarsest frequency. This paper develops a Gibbs sampler for estimating VAR models with mixed and irregularly sampled data. The approach allows efficient likelihood inference even with irregular and...

Can banks maintain their advantage as liquidity providers when they are heavily exposed to a financial crisis? The standard argument - that banks can - hinges on deposit inflows that are seeking a safe haven and provide banks with a natural hedge to fund drawn credit lines and other commitments....

This paper shows that higher commodity dependence reduces the government's incentive to invest in fiscal capacity. After developing a model that makes this prediction, evidence is provided supporting the view that countries more dependent on commodities (whose rents can be easily appropriated by...

This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...