Economic forecasting is a key ingredient of decision making in the public and private sectors. This book provides the necessary tools to solve real-world forecasting problems using time-series methods. It targets undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in public and private institutions interested in applied economic forecasting.
Advances in Econometrics publishes original scholarly econometric papers with the intention of expanding the use of developed and emerging econometric techniques by disseminating ideas on the theory and practice of econometrics, throughout the empirical economic, business and social science literature.
Bayesian econometric methods have enjoyed an increase in popularity in recent years. Econometricians, empirical economists, and policymakers are increasingly making use of Bayesian methods. This handbook is a single source for researchers and policymakers wanting to learn about Bayesian methods in specialized fields, and for graduate students seeking to make the final step from textbook learning to the research frontier. It contains contributions by leading Bayesians on the latest developments in their specific fields of expertise. The volume provides broad coverage of the application of Bayesian econometrics in the major fields of economics and related disciplines, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, finance, and marketing. It reviews the state of the art in Bayesian econometric methodology, with chapters on posterior simulation and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, Bayesian nonparametric techniques, and the specialized tools used by Bayesian time series econometricians such as state space models and particle filtering. It also includes chapters on Bayesian principles and methodology.
This book contributes to re cent developments on the statistical analysis of multiple time series in the presence of regime shifts. Markov-switching models have become popular for modelling non-linearities and regime shifts, mainly, in univariate eco nomic time series. This study is intended to provide a systematic and operational ap proach to the econometric modelling of dynamic systems subject to shifts in regime, based on the Markov-switching vector autoregressive model. The study presents a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical properties of Markov-switching vector autoregressive processes and the related statistical methods. The statistical concepts are illustrated with applications to empirical business cyde research. This monograph is a revised version of my dissertation which has been accepted by the Economics Department of the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 1996. It con sists mainly of unpublished material which has been presented during the last years at conferences and in seminars. The major parts of this study were written while I was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschajt (DFG), Berliner Graduier tenkolleg Angewandte Mikroökonomik and Sondeiforschungsbereich 373 at the Free University and Humboldt-University of Berlin. Work was finally completed in the project The Econometrics of Macroeconomic Forecasting founded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) at the Institute of Economies and Statistics, University of Oxford. It is a pleasure to record my thanks to these institutions for their support of my research embodied in this study.
Both state-space models and Markov switching models have been highly productive paths for empirical research in macroeconomics and finance. This book presents recent advances in econometric methods that make feasible the estimation of models that have both features. One approach, in the classical framework, approximates the likelihood function; the other, in the Bayesian framework, uses Gibbs-sampling to simulate posterior distributions from data.The authors present numerous applications of these approaches in detail: decomposition of time series into trend and cycle, a new index of coincident economic indicators, approaches to modeling monetary policy uncertainty, Friedman's "plucking" model of recessions, the detection of turning points in the business cycle and the question of whether booms and recessions are duration-dependent, state-space models with heteroskedastic disturbances, fads and crashes in financial markets, long-run real exchange rates, and mean reversion in asset returns.
This new edition updates Durbin & Koopman's important text on the state space approach to time series analysis. The distinguishing feature of state space time series models is that observations are regarded as made up of distinct components such as trend, seasonal, regression elements and disturbance terms, each of which is modelled separately. The techniques that emerge from this approach are very flexible and are capable of handling a much wider range of problems than the main analytical system currently in use for time series analysis, the Box-Jenkins ARIMA system. Additions to this second edition include the filtering of nonlinear and non-Gaussian series. Part I of the book obtains the mean and variance of the state, of a variable intended to measure the effect of an interaction and of regression coefficients, in terms of the observations. Part II extends the treatment to nonlinear and non-normal models. For these, analytical solutions are not available so methods are based on simulation.
Short-term Forecasting for Empirical Economists seeks to close the gap between research and applied short-term forecasting. The authors review some of the key theoretical results and empirical findings in the recent literature on short-term forecasting, and translate these findings into economically meaningful techniques to facilitate their widespread application to compute short-term forecasts in economics, and to monitor the ongoing business cycle developments in real time.
