This paper discusses the challenges faced by the empirical macroeconomist and methods for surmounting them. These challenges arise due to the fact that macroeconometric models potentially include a large number of variables and allow for time variation in parameters. These considerations lead to models which have a large number of parameters to estimate relative to the number of observations. A wide range of approaches are surveyed which aim to overcome the resulting problems. We stress the related themes of prior shrinkage, model averaging and model selection. Subsequently, we consider a particular modelling approach in detail. This involves the use of dynamic model selection methods with large TVP-VARs. A forecasting exercise involving a large US macroeconomic data set illustrates the practicality and empirical success of our approach.
Often daily prices on different markets are not all observable. The question is whether we should exclude from modelling the days with prices not available on all markets (thus loosing some information and implicitly modifying the time axis) or somehow complete the missing (non-existing) prices. In order to compare the effects of each of two ways of dealing with partly available data, one should consider formal procedures of replacing the unavailable prices by their appropriate predictions. We propose a fully Bayesian approach, which amounts to obtaining the marginal posterior (or predictive) distribution for any particular day in question. This procedure takes into account uncertainty on missing prices and can be used to check validity of informal ways of ”completing” the data (e.g. linear interpolation). We use the MSF-SBEKK structure, the simplest among hybrid MSV-MGARCH models, which can parsimoniously describe volatility of a large number of prices or indices. In order to conduct Bayesian inference, the conditional posterior distributions for all unknown quantities are derived and the Gibbs sampler (with Metropolis-Hastings steps) is designed. Our approach is applied to daily prices from six different financial and commodity markets; the data cover the period from December 21, 2005 till September 30, 2011, so the time of the global financial crisis is included. We compare inferences (on individual parameters, conditional correlation coefficients and volatilities), obtained in the cases where incomplete observations are either deleted or forecasted.
In this paper, the stock price-inflation nexus is investigated using the tools of wavelet power spectrum, cross-wavelet power spectrum and cross-wavelet coherency to unravel time and frequency dependent relationships between stock prices and inflation. Our results suggest that for a frequency band between sixteen and thirty two months, there is some evidence of the fisher effect. For rest of the frequencies and time periods however there is no evidence of the fisher effect and it seems stock prices have not played any role as an inflation hedge.
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