Browsing by Subject "inflation"
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Item Essays in International Macroeconomics and Forecasting(2012-10-19) Bejarano Rojas, Jesus AntonioThis dissertation contains three essays in international macroeconomics and financial time series forecasting. In the first essay, I show, numerically, that a two-country New-Keynesian Sticky Prices model, driven by monetary and productivity shocks, is capable of explaining the highly positive correlation across the industrialized countries' inflation even though their cross-country correlation in money growth rate is negligible. The structure of this model generates cross-country correlations of inflation, output and consumption that appear to closely correspond to the data. Additionally, this model can explain the internal correlation between inflation and output observed in the data. The second essay presents two important results. First, gains from monetary policy cooperation are different from zero when the elasticity of substitution between domestic and imported goods consumption is different from one. Second, when monetary policy is endogenous in a two-country model, the only Nash equilibria supported by this model are those that are symmetrical. That is, all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in their own currency, or all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in the importer's currency. The last essay provides both conditional and unconditional predictive ability evaluations of the aluminum futures contracts prices, by using five different econometric models, in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3, 15, and 27-months ahead for the sample period 1989.01-2010.10. From these evaluations, the best model in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3 and 15 months ahead is followed by a (VAR) model whose variables are aluminum futures contracts price, aluminum spot price and risk free interest rate, whereas for the aluminum spot price monthly return 27 months ahead is a single equation model in which the aluminum spot price today is explained by the aluminum futures price 27 months earlier. Finally, it shows that iterated multiperiod-ahead time series forecasts have a better conditional out-of-sample forecasting performance of the aluminum spot price monthly return when an estimated (VAR) model is used as a forecasting tool.Item Essays on Estimation of Inflation Equation(2009-05-15) Kim, WoongThis dissertation improves upon the estimation of inflation equation, using the ad- ditional measures of distribution of price changes and the optimum choice of instru- mental variables. The measures of dispersion and skewness of the cross-sectional distribution of price changes have been used in empirical analysis of inflation. In the first essay, we find that independent kurtosis effect can have a significant role in the approximation of inflation rate in addition to the dispersion and skewness. The kurtosis measure can improve the approximation of inflation in terms of goodness of fit. The second essay complements the first essay. It is well known that classical measures of moments are sensitive to outliers. It examines the presence of outliers in relative price changes and consider several robust alternative measures of dispersion and skewness. We find the significant relationship between inflation and robust mea- sures of dispersion and skewness. In particular, medcouple as a measure of skewness is very useful in predicting inflation. The third essay estimates the Hybrid Phillips Curve using the optimal set of instrumental variables. Instrumental variables are usually selected from a large number of valid instruments on an ad hoc basis. It has been recognized in the literature that the estimates are sensitive to the choice of instrumental variables and to the choice of the measurement of inflation. This paper uses the L2-boosting method that selects the best instruments from a large number of valid weakly exogenous instruments. We find that boosted instruments produce more comparable estimates of parameters across different measures of inflation and a higher joint precision of the estimates. Instruments boosted from principal compo- nents tend to give a little better results than the instruments from observed variables, but no significant difference is found between the ordinary and generalized principal components.