This paper investigates the recent boom od the Brazilian trade surplus by estimating a partial adjustment model for exports and imports. The results indicate that exports quantum is basically explained by the income of the rest of the world and by the gap of domestic output. The role of the...

This paper investigates the nature of income inequality across nations. Several exercises, such as variance decompositions, simulations and counter-factual analyses are performed. We find that, although total factor productivity has a leading role in explaining the dispersion of output per...

Lucas(1987) has shown a surprising result in business-cycle research: the welfare cost of business cycles are very small. Our paper has several original contributions. First, in computing welfare costs, we propose a novel setup that separates the effects of uncertainty stemming from...

We investigate whether business cycles are all alike computing the welfare costs of business cycles for European-Union (EU) as the solution of the problem proposed by Lucas (1987). Because these countries have a long tradition of integration and trade, it is a "natural experiment" to investigate...

Using vector autoregressive (VAR) models and Monte-Carlo simulation methods we investigate the potential gains for forecasting accuracy and estimation uncertainty of two commonly used restrictions arising from economic relationships. The first reduces parameter space by imposing long-term...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to econometric forecasting of stationary and ergodic time series within a panel-data framework. Our key element is to employ the (feasible) bias-corrected average forecast. Using panel-data sequential asymptotics we show that it is potentially superior...

It is well known that cointegration between the level of two variables (labeled Yt and yt in this paper) is a necessary condition to assess the empirical validity of a present-value model (PV and PVM, respectively, hereafter) linking them. The work on cointegration has been so prevalent that it...

Lucas (1987) has shown a surprising result in business-cycle research: the welfare cost of business cycles are very small. Our paper has several original contributions. First, in computing welfare costs, we propose a novel setup that separates the effects of uncertainty stemming from...

We study the joint determination of the lag length, the dimension of the cointegrating space and the rank of the matrix of short-run parameters of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model using model selection criteria. We suggest a new two-step model selection procedure which is a hybrid of...