anonymous referees and seminar participants at Stanford University and the 1999 Econometric Society

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: This paper develops a new test for speculative bubbles, which is applied to data for the Japanese yen, the German mark and the Canadian dollar exchange rates from 1977 to 1991. The test assumes that bubbles display a particular kind of regime-switching behaviour, which is shown to imply coefficient restrictions on a simple switching-regression model of exchange rate innovations. Test results are sensitive to the specification of exchange rate fundamentals and other factors. Evidence most consistent with the bubble hypothesis is found using an overshooting model of the Canadian dollar and a PPP model of the Japanese yen. Page 1 of 57 /home/int/vann/fm/swpfx/swfx_jae.acc 9 August 1995 13:50 Introduction This paper develops a new test for speculative bubbles in exchange rates and then applies this test to data for three bilateral exchange rates over the 1977 - 1991 period. Recent work in testing for bubbles has shifted from general tests that should detect any kind of bubble (Meese...

A new time series model is proposed to describe observed asymmetries in postwar unemployment data. We assume that recession periods, when unemployment increases rapidly, are caused by unobserved positive shocks. The generating mechanism of these latent shocks is a censored regression model, where linear combinations of lagged explanatory variables lead to positive shocks, while otherwise shocks are equal to zero. We apply our censored latent effects autoregression (CLEAR) to monthly US unemployment, where the positive shocks are found to depend on lagged oil prices, industrial production, the term structure of interest rates and a stock market index. The model fits the data well, and its out-of-sample forecasts appear to outperform those from alternative models.

This paper argues that a linear statistical model with homoskedastic errors cannot capture the nineteenth-century notion of a recurring cyclical pattern in key economic aggregates. A simple nonlinear alternative is proposed and used to illustrate that the dynamic behavior of unemployment seems to change over the business cycle, with the unemployment rate rising more quickly than it falls. Furthermore, many but not all economic downturns are also accompanied by a dramatic change in the dynamic behavior of short-term interest rates. It is suggested that these nonlinearities are most naturally interpreted as resulting from short-run failures in the employment and credit markets and that understanding these short-run failures is the key to understanding the nature of the business cycle.

In this paper, we use an extension of Hamilton's (1989) Markov switching techniques to describe and analyze stock market returns. Using new tests, we find very strong evidence of switching behaviour. A major innovation of our work is to use a multivariate specification which allows us to examine whether the price-dividend ratio has marginal predictive power for stock market returns after accounting for state-dependent switching. We find strong evidence of predictability. The response of returns to the past price-dividend ratio is strongly asymmetric - about four times larger in the low-return state than in the high-return state. A second innovation in our work is to allow the probability of transitions from one regime to another to depend on economic variables. Here again, we find an asymmetric response to the past price-dividend ratio. 1 1 There is also an interesting paper by McQueen and Thorley (1991) which uses Markov chains to test the random walk model of stock market returns....

Abstract: This paper analyses three Granger noncausality hypotheses within a conditionally Gaussian MS-VAR model. Noncausality in mean is based on Granger’s original concept for linear predictors by defining noncausality from the 1-step ahead forecast error variance for the conditional expectation. Noncausality in mean-variance concerns the conditional forecast error variance, while noncausality in distribution refers to the conditional distribution of the forecast errors. Necessary and sufficient parametric conditions for noncausality are presented for all hypotheses. As an illustration, the hypotheses are tested using monthly postwar U. S. data on money and income. We find that money is not Granger causal in mean for income, but Granger causal in mean-variance, i.e. there is unique information in money for predicting the next period regime and the regime affects the uncertainty about the income forecast.

This paper employs Hamilton’s (1989) original Markov-switching model and time-varying Markov-switching model developed by Filardo (1994), respectively, to investigate the business cycle and evaluate the usefulness of the coincident and leading indexes in dating the business cycle and in predicting future GDP in Taiwan. The empirical results do suggest that these two indexes help date the business cycle in Taiwan and improve precision in predicting turning points. As for forecasting future GDP, the coincident index is useful whereas the leading index is not. JEL classification: C22; C52; E32 Keywords: Markov-switching model, time-varying transition probability, Taiwan business cycle, leading index, coincident index

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We address the issue of time varying persistence of shocks to macroeconomic time series variables by proposing a new and parsimonious time series model. Our model assumes that this time varying persistence depends on a linear combination of lagged explanatory variables, where this combination characterizes the business cycle regimes. The key feature of our model is that an autoregressive parameter takes larger values only when this indicator variable exceeds a stochastic threshold. The parameters and the (lags of the) variables that constitute the indicator variable have to be determined from the data. Other forms of censoring amount to straightforward extensions. Our application to US unemployment shows that the model fits very well. A linear combination of lagged (differenced) industrial production, oil price, interest spread and stock returns amounts to an adequate indicator of an upcoming recession, which corresponds with explosive behavior of unemployment. Also, the out-of-sample ...