We use noncausal autoregressions to examine the persistence properties of quarterly U.S. consumer price inflation from 1970:1—2012:2. These nonlinear models capture the autocorrelation structure of the inflation series as accurately as their conventional causal counterparts, but they allow for persistence to depend on the size and sign of shocks to inflation as well as the inflation rate. Infla...

This paper considers the problem of constructing confidence sets for the date of a single break in a linear time series regression. We establish analytically and by small sample simulation that the current standard method in econometrics for constructing such confidence intervals has a coverage rate far below nominal levels when breaks are of moderate magnitude. Given that breaks of moderate ma...

The paper analyzes the effect of incentives regulation, when the yardstick competition approach is supplemented with a performance tax on providers. In an application to prospective payments in health care in the U.S. and Japan, we show differential effects of value-based purchasing, when price-setting is related to benchmark values of quality measures or length-of-stay. The predictions of our ...

 The foreign exchange market (FX market) accounts for 40% of the total volume of the world’s e-commerce by its own. Based on statistics, sometimes up to 90 per cent of the traders lose their total capital in this market just within six months to one year and leave this market. The probability of loss in the FX market can be estimated by probability theory. The present paper intends to demonst...

This paper deals with a critical assessment and a reestimation of the “non–accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (NAIRU) for Germany. There are quite a few obstacles to perceiving the NAIRU as an understandable and easy–to–use analytical instrument, suitable for economic policy: the possibility of a non–vertical Phillips curve (e.g. in times of low inflation), the occurrence of shocks an...

GARCH (1,1) models are widely used for modelling processes with time varying volatility. These include financial time series, which can be particularly heavy tailed. In this paper, we propose a logtransform-based least squares estimator (LSE) for the GARCH (1,1) model. The asymptotic properties of the LSE are studied under very mild moment conditions for the errors. We establish the consistency...

The slope of the Treasury yield curve has often been cited as a leading economic indicator, with inversion of the curve being thought of as a harbinger of a recession. In this paper, I consider a number of probit models using the yield curve to forecast recessions. Models that use both the level of the federal funds rate and the term spread give better insample fit, and better out-of-sample pre...

This paper provides closed-form likelihood approximations for multivariate jump-diffusion processes widely used in finance. For a fixed order of approximation, the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) computed from this approximate likelihood achieves the asymptotic efficiency of the true yet uncomputable MLE as the sampling interval shrinks. This method is used to uncover the realignment probabi...

In this paper, an empirically stable money demand model for M3 in the euro area is constructed. Starting with a multivariate system, three cointegrating relationships with economic content are found: (i) the spread between the longand the short-term nominal interest rates, (ii) the long-term real interest rate, and (iii) a long-run demand for broad money M3. There is evidence that the determina...

The paper analyzes the interactions between the precision of information, trade and welfare within a decision framework of an exporting firm. Information in a financial market is described in terms of a publicly observable signal. With higher transparency, the signal conveys more precise information about the random foreign exchange rate. More precise information about exchange rate changes has...