This paper addresses how to enhance the role of data in structural model design by utilizing structural breaks and superfluous information as auxiliary tools of exact identification. To illustrate the procedure and to study the simultaneous interplay between financial variables and the real side...

We find empirical evidence of a financial accelerator using a data based procedure of Structural Model Design. Credit to firms, asset prices and aggregate economic activity interact over the business cycle in our empirical model of a dynamic economy. Furthermore, the interdependence between...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

An explication of the key ideas behind the Cointegrated Vector Autoregression Approach. The CVAR approach is related to Haavelmo's famous quot;Probability Approach in Econometricsquot; (1944). It insists on careful stochastic specification as a necessary groundwork for econometric inference and...

Previous studies have shown that linear models are incapable of capturing business cycle dynamics with accuracy. This has brought interest in non-linear models such as the Markov switching (MS) regime technique, which can distinguish business cycle recession and expansion phases, and is...

The aim of the paper is to study the nature of normalization in Structural VAR models. Noting that normalization is the integral part of identification of a model, we provide a general characterization of the normalization. In consequence some the easy–to–check conditions for a Structural...

Campbell and Shiller average 10 years of real S&P 500 earnings to construct its Cyclically Adjusted P/E ratio, or CAPE, which they then use to forecast its future 10-year returns. In essence, Campbell and Shiller kill two birds with one large stone - they use the 10-year average to reduce noise...

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based in the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal...

The ordinary least square method (OLS) is frequently used for the parameters estimation of different functional relationships. Having in view a series of properties revealed by the author, this paper presents the factors that determine the size of the estimated parameters and coefficients of...