Under numerical fiscal rules, such as those underpinning EMU, governments have strong temptations to use accounting tricks to meet the fiscal constraints. Given these political incentives, fiscal variables that in the past were regarded as a mere residual acquire a strategic role. This is the...

This paper develops a NATREX (NATural Real EXchange rate) model for two large economies, the Eurozone and the United States. The NATREX approach has already been adopted to explain the medium-long term dynamics of the real exchange rate in a number of industrial countries. So far, however, it...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with recursive preferences such as those in Epstein and Zin (1989 and 1991) and stochastic volatility. Models with these two features have recently become popular,...

This paper develops new results for identification and estimation of Gaussian affine term structure models. We establish that three popular canonical representations are unidentified, and demonstrate how unidentified regions can complicate numerical optimization. A separate contribution of the...

This paper surveys efforts to automate the dating of business cycle turning points. Doing this on a real time, out-of-sample basis is a bigger challenge than many academics might presume due to factors such as data revisions and changes in economic relationships over time. The paper stresses the...

Yemen has had a high and volatile rate of inflation in recent years. This paper studies the underlying determinants of inflation dynamics in Yemen using three different approaches: (i) a single equation model, (ii) a Structural Vector Autoregression Model, and (iii) a Vector Error Correction...

Nancy Cartwright views models as blueprints for nomological machines – machines that, if properly shielded, generate law-like behaviour or regularities. Marcel Boumans has argued that we can look for devices inside models, which enable us to measure aspects of these regularities. Therefore, if...

We consider sequences of random variables of the type $S_n= n^{-1/2} \sum_{k=1}^n f(X_k)$, $n\geq 1$, where $X=(X_k)_{k\in \Z}$ is a $d$-dimensional Gaussian process and $f: \R^d \rightarrow \R$ is a measurable function.It is known that, under certain conditions on $f$ and the covariance...