Five alternative techniques have been applied to measure the degree of uncertainty associated with the forecasts produced by a macro-model of the French economy, the Mini-DMS developed at INSEE. They are bootstrap, analytic simulation on coefficients, Monte Carlo on coefficients, parametric...

This paper presents a Monte-Carlo study on the practical reliability of numerical algorithms for FIML-estimation in nonlinear econometric models. The performance of different techniques of Hessian approximation in trust-region algorithms is compared regarding their "robustness" against "bad"...

With most of the available software packages, estimates of the parameter covariance matrix in a GARCH model are usually obtained from the outer products of the first derivatives of the log-likelihoods (BHHH estimator). However, other estimators could be defined and used, analogous to the...

This article describes the application to an operational medium-size econometric model, mini-DMS, of methods associating, to deterministic forecasts, a measure of the uncertainty due to the stochastic nature of behavioural equations. After having described the theoretical and practical...

For a nonlinear system of simultaneous equations, the mode of the joint distribution of the endogenous variables in the forecast period is proposed as alternative to the more usual deterministic or mean predictors. A first method follows from maximizing the joint density of a subset of the...

This paper shows how to compute asymptotic standard errors of the characteristic roots of a nonlinear econometric model. The system of simultaneous equations is linearized in the neighborhood of a given point, then characteristic roots and related standard errors are computed.

It is purpose of this paper to evidence, in the behaviour of the Mini-DMS model for the French economy, some stochastic properties which may confirm, strengthen or sometimes contradict the results obtained from the standard simulation analysis, which is purely deterministic. In particular, the...

Multipliers are often used for selecting alternative policies in economic planning and forecasting. Particular variables like employment, trade balance, inflation or government budget usually impose constraints on the policy action. Therefore a criterion to be preferred to the raw multiplier...

The evaluation of policy actions by means of a large scale econometric model often begins with the analysis of multipliers. A large value of a multiplier, with the right sign, suggests that the policy instrument should be very effective in moving up or down the given target variable. However,...

The drawbacks of forecasts obtained with the usual deterministic solution methods in nonlinear systems of stochastic equations have been widely investigated in the literature. Most of the proposed therapies are based on some estimation of the conditional mean of the endogenous variables in the...