Volume 25, Issue 4

We construct business cycle indexes based on the daily Japanese newspaper articles and estimate the Phillips curve model to forecast inflation at a daily frequency. We find that the news-based leading indicator, constructed from the topic on future economic conditions, is useful in forecasting the inflation rate in Japan.

We present the findings of a new time-series model that estimates short-term health effects of particulate matter and ozone, as applied to three U.S. cities. The model is based on observed fluctuations of daily death counts and estimates the corresponding daily subpopulations at-risk of imminent death; it also shows that virtually all elderly deaths are preceded by a brief period of extreme frailty. We augment previous research by allowing new entrants to this at-risk population to be influenced by the environment, rather than be random. The mean frail subpopulations in the three cities, each containing between 3000 and 5000 daily observations on mortality, pollution, and temperature, are estimated to be about 0.1% of those aged 65 or more, and their life expectancies in this frail status are about one week. We find losses in life expectancy due to air pollution and temperature to be at most one day. Air pollution effects on new entrants into the frail population tend to exceed those on mortality. Our results provide context to the many time-series studies that have found significant short-term relationships between air quality and survival, and they suggest that benefits of air quality improvement should be based on increased life expectancy rather than estimated numbers of excess deaths.

Explicit formulae for maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of square root processes and Bessel processes and first and second order approximate sufficient statistics are supplied. Applications of the estimation formulae to simulated interest rate and index time series are supplied, demonstrating the accuracy of the approximations and the extreme speed-up in estimation time. This significantly improved run time for parameter estimation has many applications where ex-ante forecasts are required frequently and immediately, such as in hedging interest rate, index and volatility derivatives based on such models, as well as modelling credit risk, mortality rates, population size and voting behaviour.

We propose a new monitoring procedure based on moving sums (MOSUM) for detecting single or multiple structural breaks in factor copula models. The test compares parameter estimates from a rolling window to those from a historical data set and analyzes the behavior under the null hypothesis of no parameter change. The case of multiple breaks is also treated. In the model, the joint copula is given by the copula of random variables which arise from a factor model. This is particularly useful for analyzing high dimensional data. Parameters are estimated with the simulated method of moments (SMM). We analyze the behavior of the monitoring procedure in Monte Carlo simulations and a real data application. We consider an online procedure for predicting the day-ahead Value-at-risk based on the suggested monitoring procedure.

This paper constructs a composite leading index for business cycle prediction based on vine copulas that capture the complex pattern of dependence among individual predictors. This approach is optimal in the sense that the resulting index possesses the highest discriminatory power as measured by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The model specification is semi-parametric in nature, suggesting a two-step estimation procedure, with the second-step finite dimensional parameter being estimated by QMLE given the first-step non-parametric estimate. To illustrate its usefulness, we apply this methodology to optimally aggregate the 10 leading indicators selected by The Conference Board (TCB) to predict economic recessions in the United States. In terms of the discriminatory power, our method is significantly better than the Index used by TCB.

The asymmetric short – and long-run relationships between BRICS stock markets are examined using monthly stock price data from January 2001 through December 2014. The asymmetric co-integration analysis confirms the presence of a long-run association between the BRICS stock markets; where, the speed of adjustment to the negative shocks is higher and statistically significant for the Brazil-India and China-India pairs, which indicates quick adjustment of stock prices to bad news compared to good news. Conversely, the speed of adjustment for Indian and South African stock markets is higher for positive shocks, while the relationship between the stock markets pair of Russia and South Africa is linear. The results of asymmetric error correction model (AECM) reveal evidence of bidirectional causality between China-India, India-South Africa and South Africa-Russia, while unidirectional causality runs from the Indian to Brazilian stock market. Thus, we can safely conclude that the Indian stock market has long-run and short-run relationships with most of the other stock markets. This suggests that investors should pay attention to the Indian stock market when investing in BRICS stock markets.

We investigate the effects of discretionary changes in government spending and taxes using a medium-scale nonlinear vector autoregressive model with policy shocks identified via sign restrictions. Tax cuts and spending increases have larger stimulative effects when there is excess slack in the economy, while they are much less effective, especially in the case of government spending increases, when the economy is close to potential. We find that contractionary shocks have larger effects than expansionary shocks across the business cycle, but this is much more pronounced during deep recessions and sluggish recoveries than in robust expansions. Notably, tax increases are highly contractionary and largely self-defeating in reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio when the economy is in a deep recession. The effectiveness of discretionary government spending, including its state dependence, appears to be almost entirely due to the response of consumption. The responses of both consumption and investment to discretionary tax changes are state dependent, but investment plays the larger quantitative role.