Econometrics — Open Access Journal

This paper draws upon influence function regression methods to determine where foreign workers stand in the distribution of private sector wages in Luxembourg, and assess whether and how much their wages contribute to wage inequality. This is quantified by measuring the effect that a marginal increase in the proportion of foreign workers—foreign residents or cross-border workers—would have on selected quantiles and measures of inequality. Analysis of the 2006 Structure of Earnings Survey reveals that foreign workers have generally lower wages than natives and therefore tend to haul the overall wage distribution downwards. Yet, their influence on wage inequality reveals small and negative. All impacts are further muted when accounting for human capital and, especially, job characteristics. Not observing any large positive inequality contribution on the Luxembourg labour market is a striking result given the sheer size of the foreign workforce and its polarization at both ends of the skill distribution. Full article

In forecasting a variable (forecast target) using many predictors, a factor model with principal components (PC) is often used. When the predictors are the yield curve (a set of many yields), the Nelson–Siegel (NS) factor model is used in place of the PC factors. These PC or NS factors are combining information (CI) in the predictors (yields). However, these CI factors are not “supervised” for a specific forecast target in that they are constructed by using only the predictors but not using a particular forecast target. In order to “supervise” factors for a forecast target, we follow Chan et al. (1999) and Stock and Watson (2004) to compute PC or NS factors of many forecasts (not of the predictors), with each of the many forecasts being computed using one predictor at a time. These PC or NS factors of forecasts are combining forecasts (CF). The CF factors are supervised for a specific forecast target. We demonstrate the advantage of the supervised CF factor models over the unsupervised CI factor models via simple numerical examples and Monte Carlo simulation. In out-of-sample forecasting of monthly US output growth and inflation, it is found that the CF factor models outperform the CI factor models especially at longer forecast horizons. Full article

We propose and study the stochastic stationary root model. The model resembles the cointegrated VAR model but is novel in that: (i) the stationary relations follow a random coefficient autoregressive process, i.e., exhibhits heavy-tailed dynamics, and (ii) the system is observed with measurement error. Unlike the cointegrated VAR model, estimation and inference for the SSR model is complicated by a lack of closed-form expressions for the likelihood function and its derivatives. To overcome this, we introduce particle filter-based approximations of the log-likelihood function, sample score, and observed Information matrix. These enable us to approximate the ML estimator via stochastic approximation and to conduct inference via the approximated observed Information matrix. We conjecture the asymptotic properties of the ML estimator and conduct a simulation study to investigate the validity of the conjecture. Model diagnostics to assess model fit are considered. Finally, we present an empirical application to the 10-year government bond rates in Germany and Greece during the period from January 1999 to February 2018. Full article

This paper proposes an approach to measure the extent of nonlinearity of the exposure of a financial asset to a given risk factor. The proposed measure exploits the decomposition of a conditional expectation into its linear and nonlinear components. We illustrate the method with the measurement of the degree of nonlinearity of a European style option with respect to the underlying asset. Next, we use the method to identify the empirical patterns of the return-risk trade-off on the SP500. The results are strongly supportive of a nonlinear relationship between expected return and expected volatility. The data seem to be driven by two regimes: one regime with a positive return-risk trade-off and one with a negative trade-off. Full article

We use a cointegrated structural vector autoregressive model to investigate the relation between monetary policy in the euro area and the stock market. Since there may be an instantaneous causal relation, we consider long-run identifying restrictions for the structural shocks and also used (conditional) heteroscedasticity in the residuals for identification purposes. Heteroscedasticity is modelled by a Markov-switching mechanism. We find a plausible identification scheme for stock market and monetary policy shocks which is consistent with the second-order moment structure of the variables. The model indicates that contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to a long-lasting downturn of real stock prices. Full article

Econometric analysis requires filtering techniques that are adapted to cater to data sequences that are short and that have strong trends. Whereas the economists have tended to conduct their analyses in the time domain, the engineers have emphasised the frequency domain. This paper places its emphasis in the frequency domain; and it shows how the frequency-domain methods can be adapted to cater to short trended sequences. Working in the frequency domain allows an unrestricted choice to be made of the frequency response of a filter. It also requires that the data should be free of trends. Methods for extracting the trends prior to filtering and for restoring them thereafter are described. Full article

A novel class of dimension reduction methods is combined with a stochastic multi-factor panel regression-based state-space model in order to model the dynamics of yield curves whilst incorporating regression factors. This is achieved via Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA) in which new statistically-robust variants are derived also treating missing data. We embed the rank reduced feature extractions into a stochastic representation for state-space models for yield curve dynamics and compare the results to classical multi-factor dynamic Nelson–Siegel state-space models. This leads to important new representations of yield curve models that can be practically important for addressing questions of financial stress testing and monetary policy interventions, which can incorporate efficiently financial big data. We illustrate our results on various financial and macroeconomic datasets from the Euro Zone and international market. Full article

${\ell }_1$ polynomial trend filtering, which is a filtering method described as an ${\ell }_1$-norm penalized least-squares problem, is promising because it enables the estimation of a piecewise polynomial trend in a univariate economic time series without prespecifying the number and location of knots. This paper shows some theoretical results on the filtering, one of which is that a small modification of the filtering provides not only identical trend estimates as the filtering but also extrapolations of the trend beyond both sample limits. Full article

Statistical methods are widely used for valuation (prediction of the value at sale or auction) of a unique object such as a work of art. The usual approach is estimation of a hedonic model for objects of a given class, such as paintings from a particular school or period, or in the context of real estate, houses in a neighborhood. Where the object itself has previously sold, an alternative is to base an estimate on the previous sale price. The combination of these approaches has been employed in real estate price index construction (e.g., Jiang et al. 2015); in the present context, we treat the use of these different sources of information as a forecast combination problem. We first optimize the hedonic model, considering the level of aggregation that is appropriate for pooling observations into a sample, and applying model-averaging methods to estimate predictive models at the individual-artist level. Next, we consider an additional stage in which we incorporate repeat-sale information, in a subset of cases for which this information is available. The methods are applied to a data set of auction prices for Canadian paintings. We compare the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of different methods and find that those that allow us to use single-artist samples produce superior results, that data-driven averaging across predictive models tends to produce clear gains, and that, where available, repeat-sale information appears to yield further improvements in predictive accuracy. Full article

In applied econometric literature, the causal inferences are often made based on temporally aggregated or systematically sampled data. A number of studies document that temporal aggregation has distorting effects on causal inference and systematic sampling of stationary variables preserves the direction of causality. Contrary to the stationary case, this paper shows for the bivariate VAR(1) system that systematic sampling induces spurious bi-directional Granger causality among the variables if the uni-directional causality runs from a non-stationary series to either a stationary or a non-stationary series. An empirical exercise illustrates the relative usefulness of the results further. Full article

It is sometimes observed and frequently assumed that top incomes in household surveys worldwide are poorly measured and that this problem biases the measurement of income inequality. This paper tests this assumption and compares the performance of reweighting and replacing methods designed to correct inequality measures for top-income biases generated by data issues such as unit or item non-response. Results for the European Union’s Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey indicate that survey response probabilities are negatively associated with income and bias the measurement of inequality downward. Correcting for this bias with reweighting, the Gini coefficient for Europe is revised upwards by 3.7 percentage points. Similar results are reached with replacing of top incomes using values from the Pareto distribution when the cut point for the analysis is below the 95th percentile. For higher cut points, results with replacing are inconsistent suggesting that popular parametric distributions do not mimic real data well at the very top of the income distribution. Full article

In 2002, the Israeli government decided to build a wall inside the occupied West Bank. The wall had a marked effect on the access to land and water resources as well as to the Israeli labour market. It is difficult to include the effect of the wall in an econometric model explaining poverty dynamics as the wall was built in the richer region of the West Bank. So a diff-in-diff strategy is needed. Using a Bayesian approach, we treat our two-period repeated cross-section data set as an incomplete data problem, explaining the income-to-needs ratio as a function of time invariant exogenous variables. This allows us to provide inference results on poverty dynamics. We then build a conditional regression model including a wall variable and state dependence to see how the wall modified the initial results on poverty dynamics. We find that the wall has increased the probability of poverty persistence by 58 percentage points and the probability of poverty entry by 18 percentage points. Full article

This paper provides a detailed exposition of an extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method that can be applied to various distributional measures. The two-stage procedure first divides distributional changes into a wage structure effect and a composition effect using a reweighting method. Second, the two components are further divided into the contribution of each explanatory variable using recentered influence function (RIF) regressions. We illustrate the practical aspects of the procedure by analyzing how the polarization of U.S. male wages between the late 1980s and the mid 2010s was affected by factors such as de-unionization, education, occupations, and industry changes. Full article

Structural break tests for regression models are sensitive to model misspecification. We show—analytically and through simulations—that the sup Wald test for breaks in the conditional mean and variance of a time series process exhibits severe size distortions when the conditional mean dynamics are misspecified. We also show that the sup Wald test for breaks in the unconditional mean and variance does not have the same size distortions, yet benefits from similar power to its conditional counterpart in correctly specified models. Hence, we propose using it as an alternative and complementary test for breaks. We apply the unconditional and conditional mean and variance tests to three US series: unemployment, industrial production growth and interest rates. Both the unconditional and the conditional mean tests detect a break in the mean of interest rates. However, for the other two series, the unconditional mean test does not detect a break, while the conditional mean tests based on dynamic regression models occasionally detect a break, with the implied break-point estimator varying across different dynamic specifications. For all series, the unconditional variance does not detect a break while most tests for the conditional variance do detect a break which also varies across specifications. Full article

The generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator of the reduced-rank regression model is derived under the assumption of conditional homoscedasticity. It is shown that this GMM estimator is algebraically identical to the maximum likelihood estimator under normality developed by Johansen (1988). This includes the vector error correction model (VECM) of Engle and Granger. It is also shown that GMM tests for reduced rank (cointegration) are algebraically similar to the Gaussian likelihood ratio tests. This shows that normality is not necessary to motivate these estimators and tests. Full article

In this study, we provide a Bayesian estimation method for the unconditional quantile regression model based on the Re-centered Influence Function (RIF). The method makes use of the dichotomous structure of the RIF and estimates a non-linear probability model by a logistic regression using a Gibbs within a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. This approach performs better in the presence of heavy-tailed distributions. Applied to a nationally-representative household survey, the Senegal Poverty Monitoring Report (2005), the results show that the change in the rate of returns to education across quantiles is substantially lower at the primary level. Full article

There is substantial evidence that inflation rates are characterized by long memory and nonlinearities. In this paper, we introduce a long-memory Smooth Transition AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average-Markov Switching Multifractal specification [ $\mathrm{STARFIMA}(p,d,q)$ - $\mathrm{MSM}\left(k\right)$ ] for modeling and forecasting inflation uncertainty. We first provide the statistical properties of the process and investigate the finite sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimators through simulation. Second, we evaluate the out-of-sample forecast performance of the model in forecasting inflation uncertainty in the G7 countries. Our empirical analysis demonstrates the superiority of the new model over the alternative $\mathrm{STARFIMA}(p,d,q)$ - $\mathrm{GARCH}$ -type models in forecasting inflation uncertainty. Full article