This paper assesses whether the UK public finances were sustainable for the period 1919 to 2001 using a nonlinear representation of the debt to GDP ratio and thus provides a more robust test of debt sustainability. Empirical evidence supports debt sustainability. Moreover, the ESTAR representation is evidence that sustainability is the result of active debt management rather than tax-smoothing....

We study the stationary solution to the recursion Xn+1 = γXn+ξn, where γ ∈ (0, 1) is a constant and ξn are Gaussian variables with random parameters. Specifically, we assume that ξn = μn + σnεn, where (ε)n∈Z is an i.i.d. sequence of standard normal variables and (μn, σn)n∈Z is a stationary and ergodic process independent of (εn)n∈Z, which serves as an exogenous dynamic environment for the model...

Monthly seasonally unadjusted data can exhibit roots with possibly fractional orders of integration, corresponding to the monthly but also to the quarterly and to the long-run or trending components of the series. In this paper we use a procedure which is suitable to test simultaneously for the order of integration of each of these components and apply it to several US monetary aggregates. JEL ...

We re-examine the empirical relevance of the cost channel of monetary policy (e.g. Ravenna andWalsh, 2006), employing recently developed moment-conditions inference methods, including identi…cation-robust procedures. Using US data, our results suggest that the cost channel e¤ect is poorly identi…ed and we are thus unable to corroborate the previous results in the literature. Keywords: Cost chan...

This paper examines the role of carry trade and momentum trading strategies and their implications for the magnitude of the forward premium anomaly. The formal analysis uses a logistic smooth transition regression, with transition variables related to the di¤erent currency trading strategies. The hypothesis of uncovered interest parity is found to hold in an upper regime where carry trades appe...

A panel of ex-ante forecasts of a single time series is modeled as a dynamic factor model, where the conditional expectation is the single unobserved factor. When applied to out-of-sample forecasting, this leads to combination forecasts that are based on methods other than OLS. These methods perform well in a Monte Carlo experiment. These methods are evaluated empirically in a panel of simulate...

This paper proposes an exact Gaussian estimator for nonlinear continuous time models of the term structure of interest rates. The approach is based on a stopping time argument that produces a normalizing transformation facilitating the use of a Gaussian likelihood. A Monte Carlo study shows that the finite sample performance of the proposed procedure offers an improvement over the discrete appr...

This paper discusses the existence of spurious long memory in common nonlinear time series models, namely Markov switching and threshold models. We describe the asymptotic behavior of the process in terms of autocovariance and autocorrelation function and support the theoretical evidences by providing Monte Carlo simulation. The existence of long memory in these nonlinear processes is induced b...