This book discusses the econometric foundations of structural vector autoregressive modeling, as used in empirical macroeconomics, finance, and related fields.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
Kosorok’s brilliant text provides a self-contained introduction to empirical processes and semiparametric inference. These powerful research techniques are surprisingly useful for developing methods of statistical inference for complex models and in understanding the properties of such methods. This is an authoritative text that covers all the bases, and also a friendly and gradual introduction to the area. The book can be used as research reference and textbook.
This paper proposes a novel way of formulating priors for estimating economic models. System priors are priors about the model's features and behavior as a system, such as the sacrifice ratio or the maximum duration of response of inflation to a particular shock, for instance. System priors represent a very transparent and economically meaningful way of formulating priors about parameters, without the unintended consequences of independent priors about individual parameters. System priors may complement or also substitute for independent marginal priors. The new philosophy of formulating priors is motivated, explained and illustrated using a structural model for monetary policy.
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009 address how heterogeneous beliefs interact with equilibrium leverage and potentially lead to leverage cycles, the validity of alternative hypotheses about the reason for the recent increase in foreclosures on residential mortgages, the credit rating crisis, quantitative implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution, and noisy business cycles.
This 2003 book offers the most systematic analysis available of the impact of European Central Bank monetary policy on the national economies of the Eurozone. Analysing macro and micro-economic evidence, with chapters by central bank economists, including a discussion chapter by eminent macroeconomists, it is an essential contribution to research on the subject.
Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB's policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete picture of the economy. However, treating monetary factors as a separate matter is a second-best solution. Instead, a general-equilibrium inspired analytical framework that merges the economic and monetary "pillars" of the ECB's policy strategy appears the most promising way forward. The role played by monetary aggregates in such unified framework may be rather limited. However, an integrated framework would facilitate the presentation of policy decisions by providing a clearer narrative of the relative role of money in the interaction with other economic and financial sector variables, including asset prices, and their impact on consumer prices.
This text aims to provide a survey of the state of knowledge in the broad area that includes the theories and facts of economic growth and economic fluctuations, as well as the consequences of monetary and fiscal policies for general economic conditions.
The second edition of a comprehensive state-of-the-art graduate level text on microeconometric methods, substantially revised and updated. The second edition of this acclaimed graduate text provides a unified treatment of two methods used in contemporary econometric research, cross section and data panel methods. By focusing on assumptions that can be given behavioral content, the book maintains an appropriate level of rigor while emphasizing intuitive thinking. The analysis covers both linear and nonlinear models, including models with dynamics and/or individual heterogeneity. In addition to general estimation frameworks (particular methods of moments and maximum likelihood), specific linear and nonlinear methods are covered in detail, including probit and logit models and their multivariate, Tobit models, models for count data, censored and missing data schemes, causal (or treatment) effects, and duration analysis. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data was the first graduate econometrics text to focus on microeconomic data structures, allowing assumptions to be separated into population and sampling assumptions. This second edition has been substantially updated and revised. Improvements include a broader class of models for missing data problems; more detailed treatment of cluster problems, an important topic for empirical researchers; expanded discussion of "generalized instrumental variables" (GIV) estimation; new coverage (based on the author's own recent research) of inverse probability weighting; a more complete framework for estimating treatment effects with panel data, and a firmly established link between econometric approaches to nonlinear panel data and the "generalized estimating equation" literature popular in statistics and other fields. New attention is given to explaining when particular econometric methods can be applied; the goal is not only to tell readers what does work, but why certain "obvious" procedures do not. The numerous included exercises, both theoretical and computer-based, allow the reader to extend methods covered in the text and discover new insights.