We measure global real and nominal macroeconomic uncertainty and analyze its impact on individual countries’ macroeconomic performance. Global uncertainty is measured through the conditional variances of global factors in inflation and output growth, estimated from a bivariate dynamic factor model with GARCH errors. The impact of global uncertainty is measured by including the conditional varia...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential) weak identification of these curves under generalized methods of moments (GMM) and traces this syndrome...

This paper uses household level unit record data from South Africa to examine the behavioural and welfare impacts of private and public transfers. We allow for joint endogeneity of resource variables and the expenditure shares. Our results show that crowding out of private transfers as a result of the introduction of public pensions holds only for poor households and not for the non-poor. Both ...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on the real exchange rate and the trade balance in the US using a new VAR identification procedure based on spending forecast revisions. I find that the real exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance deteriorates after a government spending shock, although the effects are quantitatively small. The findings broadly match the theore...

In this paper we propose a relatively simple procedure to predict Euro-zone industrial production using mostly data derived from the business surveys of the three major economies within the European Monetary Union (France, Germany, and Italy). The basic idea is that of estimating business cyclical indicators to be used as predictors for the industrial production in France and Germany; as far as...

Standard tests of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis treat productivity levels in and across countries as fixed and observable, and offer little empirical support for the hypothesis. If productivity follows a jump-diffusion process, these standard tests will generate biased estimates, measuring productivity levels with error. This paper instead proposes an ‘errors in variables’ appro...

In this paper, we investigate the asymmetry in the tail dependence between US equity portfolios and the aggregate US market. Given the limited number of observations in the tails of a joint distribution, standard non-parametric measures of tail dependence often have poor finite-sample properties. We therefore develop a parametric model for measuring and testing asymmetry in tail dependence, usi...

In this paper, we propose new tests for threshold cointegration in the conditional autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model. The indicators in the threshold model are based on either a nonstationary or stationary threshold variable. The proposed tests are appropriate when the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous. The cointegrating vector in this paper is not pre-specified. We adopt a s...

We develop some asymptotic theory for applications of block bootstrap resampling schemes to multivariate integrated and cointegrated time series. It is proved that a multivariate, continuous-path block bootstrap scheme applied to a full rank integrated process, succeeds in estimating consistently the distribution of the least squares estimators in both, the regression and the spurious regressio...

Many questions in economics involve long-run or “trend” variation and covariation in time series. Yet, time series of typical lengths contain only limited information about this long-run variation. This paper suggests that long-run sample information can be isolated using a small number of low-frequency trigonometric weighted averages, which in turn can be used to conduct inference about long-r...