This major book presents, for the first time, an authoritative history of developments in macroeconometric modelling since the 1930s. It focuses in particular on the construction of mathematico-statistical models of entire economies, estimated from national accounts and other macroeconomic data. International and comparative in scope, the book contains chapters prepared by specialists from the different countries concerned. This landmark book is indispensable to an understanding of the history and development of large scale econometric models of modern economies.
R is a language and environment for data analysis and graphics. It may be considered an implementation of S, an award-winning language initially - veloped at Bell Laboratories since the late 1970s. The R project was initiated by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s, and has been developed by an international team since mid-1997. Historically, econometricians have favored other computing environments, some of which have fallen by the wayside, and also a variety of packages with canned routines. We believe that R has great potential in econometrics, both for research and for teaching. There are at least three reasons for this: (1) R is mostly platform independent and runs on Microsoft Windows, the Mac family of operating systems, and various ?avors of Unix/Linux, and also on some more exotic platforms. (2) R is free software that can be downloaded and installed at no cost from a family of mirror sites around the globe, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN); hence students can easily install it on their own machines. (3) R is open-source software, so that the full source code is available and can be inspected to understand what it really does, learn from it, and modify and extend it. We also like to think that platform independence and the open-source philosophy make R an ideal environment for reproducible econometric research.
Forecasting economic variables; Advancement of economic knowledge and the size of macro-econometric models; Construction of macro-econometric models; Evaluation of macro-econometric models.
Understanding the structure of a large econometric model is rather like the art of winetasting or like the art of playing a musical instrument. The quality of a wine results from a complex combination of various elements such as its colour which should be clear and crystalline, its smell which can be decomposed into a general aroma and a variety of particular characteristics, more or less persistent depending on the type and the age of the wine, its taste, of course, which again is a complex system whose equilibrium and charm depend on the whole set of ingredients: alcohol, tannin, glycerine, sugar, acidity . . . Similarly, a clarinetist's musicianship depends on the quality of his instrument, on his embouchure, fingering, tonguing and articu lation techniques, on his sense for rhythm, phasing and tone colour. However, the enchantment produced by a Romanee-Conti or by a brilliant performance of Brahm's F minor sonata for clarinet and piano arises from a process which is at the same time time much simpler and much more complex than the straightforward juxtaposition of individual causal relations. In recent years econometricians and macro-economists have been challenged by the problem of keeping abreast with an ever increasing number of increasingly more complex large econometric models. The necessity of developing systematic analytical tools to study the often implicit and hidden structure of these models has become more evident.
This book gives a practical, applications-oriented account of the latest techniques for estimating and analyzing large, nonlinear macroeconomic models. Ray Fair demonstrates the application of these techniques in a detailed presentation of several actual models, including his United States model, his multicountry model, Sargent's classical macroeconomic model, autoregressive and vector autoregressive models, and a small (twelve equation) linear structural model. He devotes a good deal of attention to the difficult and often neglected problem of moving from theoretical to econometric models. In addition, he provides an extensive discussion of optimal control techniques and methods for estimating and analyzing rational expectations models. A computer program that handles all the techniques in the book is available from the author, making it possible to use the techniques with little additional programming. The book presents the logic of this program. A smaller program for personal microcomputers for analysis of Fair's United States model is available from Urban Systems Research & Engineering, Inc. Anyone wanting to learn how to use large macroeconomic models, including researchers, graduate students, economic forecasters, and people in business and government both in the United States and abroad, will find this an essential guidebook.
This book is the first volume of the International Series in Economic Model ing, a series designed to summarize current issues and procedures in applied modeling within various fields of economics and to offer new or alternative approaches to prevailing problems. In selecting the subject area for the first volume, we were attracted by the area to which applied modeling efforts are increasingly being drawn, regional economics and its associated subfields. Applied modeling is a broad rubric even when the focus is restricted to econometric modeling issues. Regional econometric modeling has posted a record of rapid growth during the last two decades and has become an established field of research and application. Econometric models of states and large urban areas have become commonplace, but the existence of such models does not signal an end to further development of regional econ ometric methods and models. Many issues such as structural specification, level of geographic detail, data constraints, forecasting integrity, and syn thesis with other regional modeling techniques will continue to be sources of concern and will prompt further research efforts. The chapters of this volume reflect many of these issues. A brief synopsis of each contribution is provided below: Richard Weber offers an overview of regional econometric models by discussing theoretical specification, nature of variables, and ultimate useful ness of such models. For an illustration, Weber describes the specification of the econometric model of New Jersey.
Macroeconometric models, in many ways the flagships of the economist's profession in the 1960s, came under increasing attack from both theoretical economist and practitioners in the late 1970s. Critics referred to their lack of microeconomic theoretical foundations, ad hoc models of expectations, lack of identification, neglect of dynamics and non-stationarity, and poor forecasting properties. By the start of the 1990s, the status of macroeconometric models had declined markedly, and hadfallen completely out of, and with, academic economics. Nevertheless, unlike the dinosaurs to which they often have been likened, macroeconometric models have never completely disappeared from the scene. This book describes how and why the discipline of macroeconometric modelling continues to play a role for economic policymaking by adapting to changing demands, in response, for instance, to new policy regimes like inflation targeting. Model builders have adopted new insights from economic theory and taken advantage of the methodological and conceptual advances within time series econometrics over the last twenty years. The modelling of wages and prices takes a central part in the book as the authors interpret and evaluate the last forty years of international research experience in the light of the Norwegian 'main course' model of inflation in a small open economy. The preferred model is a dynamic model of incomplete competition, which is evaluated against alternatives as diverse as the Phillips curve, Nickell-Layard wage curves, the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and monetary inflation models on data from the Euro area, the UK, and Norway. The wage price core model is built into a small econometric model for Norway to analyse the transmission mechanism and to evaluate monetary policy rules. The final chapter explores the main sources of forecast failure likely to occur in a practical modelling situation, using the large-scale nodel RIMINI and the inflation models of earlier chapters as case studies.
