This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the nature and persistence of the forces governing the yield curve and to use the extracted information for forecasting purposes. The latent factors of a model of the Nelson-Siegel type are directly linked to the maturity of the yields through the...

We review, under a historical perspective, the development of the problem of nonfundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents’ information space is larger than the econometrician’s one. Therefore it is impossible...

Distributional assumptions are crucial in the estimation of the value of public projects assessed by means of contingent valuation analyses, and it would seem obvious that tests for model specification should play an important part in the statistical analysis. It can be observed, though, that...

Monetary policy in the US is characterized by a substantial degree of inertia. While in principle this may well be the outcome of an optimizing central bank behavior, the ability of any derived policy rule to match the data relies on so large weights for interest rate smoothing into policy...

A standard approach to estimating structural parameters in life-cycle models imposes sufficient assumptions on the data to identify the "age profile" of outcomes, then chooses model parameters so that the model's age profile matches this empirical age profile. I show that this approach is both...

We propose a method for conducting inference on impulse responses in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) when the impulse response is not point identified because the number of equality restrictions one can credibly impose is not sufficient for point identification and/or one imposes sign...

We propose simple mathematical models for the legal concept ofbalancing of interests, to resolve the conflict between the rights toprivacy and to the protection of personal data in Art. 7 and Art. 8 ofthe EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCh) against the right ofaccess to information derived...

The incorporation of increasing returns and imperfect competition into applied general-equilibrium (AGE) models, beginning with Harris (1984), led to much larger welfare effects from changes such as trade liberalization. But the imperfect competition side of these IO developments has often...

This paper uses a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified DSGE models (Del Negro and Schorfheide 2004) and applies it to a simple New Keynesian DSGE model. We illustrate the sensitivity of the results to assumptions on the policy invariance of model...

We propose a numerical method, based on indirect inference, for checking the identification of a DSGE model. Monte Carlo samples are generated from the model's true structural parameters and a VAR approximation to the reduced form estimated for each sample. We then search for a different set of...