Filippo Altissimo

New Eurocoin: Tracking Economic Growth in Real Time

This paper presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks the euro area GDP growth, but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time; (ii) is free from hort-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series, to isolate the mediumlong-run component, can be obtained by a band-pass filter. However, it is well known that band-pass filters, being two-sided, perform very poorly at the end of the sample. New Eurocoin is an estimator of the medium- long-run component of the GDP that only uses contemporaneous values of a large panel of macroeconomic time series, so that no end-of-sample deterioration occurs. Moreover, as our dataset is monthly, New Eurocoin can be updated each month and with a very short delay. Our method is based on generalized principal components that are designed to use leading variables in the dataset as proxies for future values of the GDP growth. As the medium- long-run component of the GDP is observable, although with delay, the performance of New Eurocoin at the end of the sample can be measured.

Strong rules for detecting the number of breaks in a time series

This paper proposes a new approach for detecting the number of structural breaks in a time series when estimation of the breaks is performed one at the time. We consider the case of shifts in the mean of a possibly nonlinear process, allowing for dependent and heterogeneous observations. This is accomplished through a simple, sequential, almost sure rule ensuring that, in large samples, both the probabilities of overestimating and underestimating the number of breaks are zero. A new estimator for the long run variance which is consistent also in the presence of neglected breaks is proposed. The finite sample behavior is investigated via a simulation exercise. The sequential procedure, applied to the weekly Eurodollar interest rate, detects multiple breaks over the period 1973-1995.

How deep are the deep parameters

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by Geweke, the main goal of this paper is to show that the representative agent is in general not structural, in the sense that its estimated behavioural parameters are not policyindependent. The paper identifies two different sources of nonstructurality. The latter is shown to be a fairly general feature of optimizing representative agent rational expectations models estimated on macroeconomic data.

Fast micro and slow macro: can aggregation explain the persistence of inflation?

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation sub-indices of the euro area CPI. This allows to decompose the dynamics of inflation sub-indices in two parts: one due to a common

Bounds for Inference with Nuisance Parameters Present Only Under the Alternative

In hypothesis testing with nuisance parameters present only under the alternative two issues typically arise: (i) critical values are date dependent and so cannot be tabulated; (ii) we need to choose a functional over the nuisance parameter space. We address the first issue by providing easily computable bounds for the case of dependent and heterogeneous observations. We tackle the second issue by suggesting a weighted average statistic with weights given by the (quasi) likelihood over the nuisance parameter space. The small sample behavior of our procedure is analyzed via few Monte Carlo simulations; we consider conditional moment tests and tests for nonlinearities in the SETAR model. For samples of 200-400 observations, the behavior of the suggested weighted average statistic is rather satisfactory. An empirical illustration using date on U.S. male unemployment is provided.