Kristoffer P. Nimark

A Structural Model of Australia as a Small Open Economy

This paper sets up and estimates a structural model of Australia as a small open economy using Bayesian techniques. Unlike other recent studies, the paper shows that a small micro-founded model can capture the open economy dimensions quite well. Specifically, the model attributes a substantial fraction of the volatility of domestic output and inflation to foreign disturbances, close to what is suggested by unrestricted VAR studies. The paper also investigates the effects of various exogenous shocks on the Australian economy.

A Medium-Scale New Keynesian Open Economy Model of Australia

We estimate a new Keynesian open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of Australia with a large number of shocks, frictions and rigidities, matching a large number of observable time series. We find that both foreign and domestic shocks are important drivers of the Australian business cycle. We also find that the initial impact on inflation of an increase in demand for Australian commodities is negative, because of an improvement in the real exchange rate, although there is a persistent positive effect on inflation that dominates at longer horizons.

Combining multivariate density forecasts using predictive criteria

This paper combines multivariate density forecasts of output growth, inflation and interest rates from a suite of models. An out-of-sample weighting scheme based on the predictive likelihood as proposed by Eklund and Karlsson (2005) and Andersson and Karlsson (2007) is used to combine the models. Three classes of models are considered: a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR), a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) and a medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. Using Australian data, we find that, at short forecast horizons, the Bayesian VAR model is assigned the most weight, while at intermediate and longer horizons the factor model is preferred. The DSGE model is assigned little weight at all horizons, a result that can be attributed to the DSGE model producing density forecasts that are very wide when compared with the actual distribution of observations. While a density forecast evaluation exercise reveals little formal evidence that the optimally combined densities are superior to those from the best-performing individual model, or a simple equal-weighting scheme, this may be a result of the short sample available.

Speculation and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

We develop and estimate a tractable equilibrium term structure model populated with rational but heterogeneously informed traders that take on speculative positions to exploit what they perceive to be inaccurate market expectations about future bond prices. The speculative motive is an important driver of trading volume. Yield dynamics due to speculation are (i) statistically distinct from classical term structure components due to risk premia and expectations about future short rates and are orthogonal to public information available to traders in real time and (ii) quantitatively important, accounting for a substantial fraction of the variation of long maturity US bond yields.