Markov Switching models have been successfully applied to many economic problems. The most popular version of these models implies that the change in the state is driven by a Markov Chain and that the state is an exogenous discrete unobserved variable. This hypothesis seems to be too...

In many real phenomena the behaviour of a certain variable, subjected to different regimes, depends on the state of other variables or the same variable observed in other subjects, so the knowledge of the state of the latter could be important to forecast the state of the former. In this paper a...

The integration of financial markets across countries has modified the way prices react to news. Innovations originating in one market diffuse to other markets following patterns which usually stress the presence of interdependence. In some cases, though, covariances across markets have an...

This paper is an empirical analysis of the manner in which official interest rates are determined by the Bank of England. We use a nonlinear framework that allow for the separate study of factors affecting the magnitude of positive and negative interest rate changes as well as their...

One of the main problems in modelling multivariate conditional covariance time series is the parameterization of the correlation structure because, if no constraints are imposed, it implies a large number of unknown coefficients. The most popular models propose parsimonious representations,...

A widely used filter to extract a signal in a time series, in particular in the business cycle analysis, is the Hodrick-Prescott filter. The model that underlies the filter considers the data series as the sum of two unobserved component (signal and non signal) and a smoothing parameter which...

The extraction of a common signal from a group of time series is generally obtained using variables recorded with the same frequency or transformed to have the same frequency (monthly, quarterly, etc.). The statistical literature has not paid a great deal of attention to this topic. In this...

The problem of dating the business cycle has recently received many contributions, with a lot of proposed statistical methodologies, parametric and non parametric. Despite of this, only a few countries produce an official dating of the business cycle. In this work we try to apply some procedures...

The transmission mechanisms of volatility between markets can be characterized within a new Markov Switching bivariate model where the state of one variable feeds into the transition probability of the state of the other. A number of model restrictions and hypotheses can be tested to stress the...