This paper proposes a unifying theory of forecasting in the form of a Golden Rule of Forecasting. The Golden Rule is to be conservative. A conservative forecast is consistent with cumulative knowledge about the present and the past. To be conservative, forecasters must seek all knowledge...

This paper is a substantially revised version of our earlier working paper, "Truth and Robustness in Cross-country Growth Regressions." The most important revisions concern the handling of missing observations in the cross-country data set. In the earlier paper, these had been handled through...

The work of Levine and Renelt (1992) and Sala-i-Martin (1997a, b) which attempted to test the robustness of various determinants of growth rates of per capita GDP among countries using two variants of Edward Leamer's extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment in...

It is well known that in a vector autoregressive (VAR) model Granger non-causality is characterized by a set of restrictions on the VAR coefficients. This characterization has been derived under the assumption of non-singularity of the covariance matrix of the innovations. This note shows that...

The method of instrumental variables (IV) and the generalized method of moments (GMM), and their applications to the estimation of errors-in-variables and simultaneous equations models in econometrics, require data on a sufficient number of instrumental variables that are both exogenous and...

This paper focuses on finding starting-values for the estimation of Vector STAR models. Based on a Monte Carlo study, different procedures are evaluated. Their performance is assessed with respect to model fit and computational effort. I employ (i) grid search algorithms and (ii) heuristic...