This chapter provides an overview of and user's guide to dynamic factor models (DFMs), their estimation, and their uses in empirical macroeconomics. It also surveys recent developments in methods for identifying and estimating SVARs, an area that has seen important developments over the past 15...

Slovakia joined the euro area after a period of unprecedented real appreciation. The response to financial crisis combined internal devaluation with productivity increasing measures, including capital deepening in the banking sector. Although this strategy was successfully restoring an external...

We show that when a model has more shocks than observed variables the estimated filtered and smoothed shocks will be correlated. This is despite no correlation being present in the data generating process. Additionally the estimated shock innovations may be autocorrelated. These correlations...

The paper attempts to evaluate the prospect of creating a currency union in the "Greater China" economic area including Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Despite of the political deadlock and military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, the Greater China area has experienced rapid and...

With the rapid flow of knowledge and capital from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Mainland China, a dynamic economy of “Greater China” has emerged, making the Chinese trio increasingly interdependent on trade and investment. In this paper we develop a three-variable VAR model to assess empirically...

This paper investigates how oil price changes affect consumer price inflation in eleven Central and Eastern European countries. We use a wavelet-based Markov switching approach in order to distinguish between the effects at different time horizons. We find that the transmission of oil price...

This paper examines the relationship between financial instability and monetary policy within the Swedish economy. Based on a standard VAR model of monetary policy extended to include measures of financial instability and credit expansions, we examine the interaction between monetary policy and...