The authors document a robust and interesting relationship between the real domestic price of oil and real effective exchange rates for Germany, Japan and the United States. They explain why they think the real oil price captures exogenous terms-of-trade shocks and why such shocks could be the...

This paper derives analytical gradients for a broad class of regime- switching models with Markovian state-transition probabilities. Such models are usually estimated by maximum likelihood methods, which require the derivatives of the likelihood function with respect to the parameter vector....

Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...

A probabilistic forecast is the estimated probability with which a future event will satisfy a particular criterion. One interesting feature of such forecasts is their calibration, or the match between predicted probabilities and actual outcome probabilities. Calibration has been evaluated in...

This paper develops a new test for speculative bubbles, which is applied to data for the Japanese yen, the German mark and the Canadian dollar exchange rates from 1977 to 1991. The test assumes that bubbles display aparticular kind of regime-switching behaviour, which is shown to imply...

We analyse the effects of a price floor on price wars in the retail market for gasoline. Our theoretical model assumes a Bertrand oligopoly supergame in which firms initially collude by charging the monopolistic price. Once firms detect a deviation from this strategy, they switch to a lower...

A probabilistic forecast is the estimated probability with which a future event will satisfy a specified criterion. One interesting feature of such forecasts is their calibration, or the match between predicted probabilities and actual outcome probabilities. Calibration has been evaluated in the...

Several recent papers have underlined the importance of the microstructure effects in understanding exchange rate behavior by documenting stable long-run relationships between cumulated order flows and spot exchange rates. This stands in contrast to the widely-studied failure of exchange rates...

We examine the reliability of alternative output detrending methods, with special attention to the accuracy of real-time estimates of the output gap. We show that ex post revisions of the estimated gap are of the same order of magnitude as the estimated gap itself and that these revisions are...

A stable predictive relationship between inflation and the output gap, often referred to as a Phillips curve, provides the basis for empirical formulations of countercyclical monetary policy in many models. In this paper, we provide an empirical evaluation of the usefulness of alternative...