Multivariate Unobserved Components Model Research Articles

House Price Determinants: Fundamentals and Underlying Factors

This study examines the key drivers of real house prices in the five main Euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands) and the Anglo–Saxon economies (the United Kingdom and the United States) from 1970 to 2010. Estimating the determinants of house prices is very important, as they significantly influence economic activity and financial stability. Therefore, a multivariate unobserved component model, introduced by Harvey, has been used to model house price fluctuations. This technique allows us to catch those price movements that are not fully explained by economic fundamentals. The empirical results, in fact, indicate that in addition to changes in real income, long-run interest rates, stock prices and inflation, the latent component has a significant role in explaining real house prices. The latent component reflects those factors that are not specifically observed, such as structural changes in markets and changing preferences.

Ex-ante assessment of the Spanish Occupational Health and Safety Strategy (2007–2012) using a State Space framework

Spain is above the EU-27, EU-25 and EU-15 average in the number of serious work accidents, and it is estimated that Spain is five years behind the rest of Europe in reducing such accidents. To address the problem of the high number of occupational accidents, in 2007 the Spanish Occupational Health and Safety Strategy (SOHSS, 2007–2012) was launched, with the general aim of achieving a continuous and significant reduction in work accidents, approaching the EU average in occupational accidents and illness. This article is an attempt to assess the extent to which the aims of the SOHSS have been satisfied by predicting incidence rates for different levels of accident severity (slight, serious and fatal), accidents that do not require sick leave, and commuting accidents (slight, serious and fatal). With these objectives in mind, both Univariate and Multivariate Unobserved Components models are used in an enhanced State Space framework in order to deal with the irregular sampling interval of the data from 1998 to 2010.

Asset prices, credit and the business cycle

This paper uses the multivariate unobserved components model with phase shifts to analyse the interaction of interest rates, output, asset prices and credit in the US. We find close linkages amongst cyclical fluctuations in the variables.

Taking Trends Seriously in DSGE Models: An Application to the Dutch Economy

We construct a new-Keynesian DSGE model tailored to the Netherlands and interpret it as a multivariate unobserved components model. We identify three major stochastic trends in the data — trends in general - purpose technology, investment-specific technology, and labor supply — and model them formally in our theoretical set-up. Our trend-cycle decomposition captures the data’s co-integrating properties without which long-run analysis — whether scenario analysis or forecasting — would likely be mis-specified. In particular, this approach appears to produce better-behaved posteriors for parameters along decision margins where traditional modeling imposes highly persistent but temporary shocks. The existence of permanent and temporary disturbances along the same margin broadens the scope for counter-factuals. Specifically, differences in short-run responses to the two types of shocks reflect smoothing motives and discounted valuation effects reminiscent of the Permanent Income Hypothesis.

From Many Series, One Cycle: Improved Estimates of the Business Cycle from a Multivariate Unobserved Components Model

We construct new estimates of potential output and the output gap using a multivariate approach that allows for an explicit role for measurement errors in the decomposition of real output. Because we include data on hours, output, employment, and the labor force, we are able to decompose our estimate of potential output into separate trends in labor productivity, labor-force participation, weekly hours, and the NAIRU. We find that labor-market variables—especially the unemployment rate—are the most informative individual indicators of the state of the business cycle. Conditional on including these measures, inflation is also very informative. Among measures of output, we find that although they add little to the identification for the cycle, the income-side measures of output are about as informative as the traditional product-side measures about the level of structural productivity and potential output. We also find that the output gap resulting from the recent financial crisis was very large, reaching -7 percent of output in the second half of 2009.

From Many Series, One Cycle: Improved Estimates of the Business Cycle from a Multivariate Unobserved Components Model

We construct new estimates of potential output and the output gap using a multivariate approach that allows for an explicit role for measurement errors in the decomposition of real output. Because we include data on hours, output, employment, and the labor force, we are able to decompose our estimate of potential output into separate trends in labor productivity, labor-force participation, weekly hours, and the NAIRU. We find that labor-market variables—especially the unemployment rate—are the most informative individual indicators of the state of the business cycle. Conditional on including these measures, inflation is also very informative. Among measures of output, we find that although they add little to the identification for the cycle, the income-side measures of output are about as informative as the traditional product-side measures about the level of structural productivity and potential output. We also find that the output gap resulting from the recent financial crisis was very large, reaching -7 percent of output in the second half of 2009.

Measuring the Euro area output gap using a multivariate unobserved components model containing phase shifts

Several recent studies have used multivariate unobserved components models to identify the output gap and the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. A key assumption of these models is that one common cycle component, such as the output gap, drives the cyclical fluctuations in all variables included in the model. This article also uses the multivariate approach to estimate the euro area output gap and the trends and cycles in other macroeconomic variables. However, it adopts a flexible way of linking the output gap to the cycle components in the other variables, in that we do not impose any leading or lagging restrictions between cycle components, as has been done in most previous studies. Our approach also allows us to assess the strength of cycle association and cross-correlation among cycle components using the model’s parameter estimates. Finally, we demonstrate that our multivariate model can provide a satisfactory historical output gap estimate and also a ‘real-time’ estimate for the aggregate euro area.

Estimating the neutral real interest rate in an emerging market economy

This study estimates the neutral real interest rate and output gap jointly under two different multivariate unobserved components models. In the analyses, Kalman filter is applied to a small-scale macroeconomic model of the Turkish economy to estimate the unobserved variables for the period 1989 to 2005. In addition, two alternative specifications for neutral real interest rate are exploited in the analyses. The first model uses a simple random walk model for the neutral rate, whereas the second one employs more structural specification, which specifically links the neutral rate with the trend growth rate and the long-term course of the risk premium by adapting the model proposed by Laubach and Williams (2003) to allow for small open economy consideration. Model evaluations clearly indicate the use of more structural specification against random walk specification. Results point out that the variation in the long-term course of the risk premium could be an important determinant of the neutral real interest rate in Turkey. Though there is relatively high uncertainty surrounding the neutral rate estimates to use them directly in the policy-making process, estimates appear to be very useful for ex post monetary policy evaluations.

Modelling and forecasting occupational accidents of different severity levels in Spain

The control of accidents at the work place is a critical issue all over the world. The consequences of occupational accidents in terms of costs for the company in which the accidents take place is only one minor matter, being the social impact and the loss of human life the most controversial effects of this important problem. The methods used to forecast future evolution of accidents are often limited to trend estimations and projections, being the scientific literature on this topic rather scarce. This paper aims at showing and predicting the evolution of Spanish occupational accidents of different levels of severity, allowing the evaluation of the influence that preventive actions carried out by public administrations or private companies may have over the number of occupational accidents. Though some contributions may be found on this topic for Spain, this paper is the first contribution that forecast occupational accidents for different levels of severity using Multivariate Unobserved Components models developed in a State Space framework extended to deal with the irregular sampling interval of the data. Data from 1998 to 2009 have been used to test the efficacy of the forecasting system.

Output Fluctuations in the G-7: An Unobserved Components Approach

This paper proposes a multivariate unobserved components model to simultaneously decompose the real GDP for each of the G-7 countries into their respective trend and cycle components. In contrast to previous literature, our model allows for explicit correlation between all the contemporaneous trend and cycle shocks. We find that all the G-7 countries have highly variable stochastic permanent components for output, even once we allow for structural breaks. We also find that common restrictions on the correlations between trend and cycle shocks are rejected by the data. In particular, we find that correlations across permanent and transitory shocks are important both within and across countries.

Common Business and Housing Market Cycles in the Euro Area from a Multivariate Decomposition

The 2007 sub-prime crisis in the United States, prolonged by a severe economic recession spread over many countries around the world, has led many economic researchers to focus on the recent fluctuations in housing prices and their relationships with macroeconomics and monetary policies. The existence of common housing cycles among the countries of the euro zone could lead the European Central Bank to integrate more specifically the evolution of such asset prices in its assessment. In this paper, we implement a multivariate unobserved component model on housing market variables in order to assess the common euro area housing cycle and to evaluate its relationship with the economic cycle. Among the general class of multivariate unobserved component models, we implement the band-pass filter based on the trend plus cycle decomposition model and we allow the existence of two cycles of different periods. The dataset consists of gross domestic product and real house prices series for four main euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). Empirical results show a strong relationship for business cycles in France, Italy and Spain. Moreover, French and Spanish house prices cycles appear to be strongly related, while the German one possesses its own dynamics. Finally, we find that GDP and house prices cycles are related in the medium-term for fluctuations between 4 and 8 years, while the housing market contributes to the long-term economic growth only in Spain and Germany.

A new production function estimate of the euro area output gap

AbstractWe develop a new version of the production function (PF) approach for estimating the output gap of the euro area. Assuming a CES (constant elasticity of substitution) technology, our model does not call for any (often imprecise) measure of the capital stock and improves the estimation of the trend total factor productivity using a multivariate unobserved components model. With real‐time data, we assess this approach by comparing it with the Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filter and with a Cobb–Douglas PF approach with common cycle and implemented with a multivariate unobserved components model. Our new PF estimate appears highly concordant with the reference chronology of turning points and has better real‐time properties than the univariate HP filter for sufficiently long time horizons. Its inflation forecasting power appears, like the other multivariate approach, less favourable than the statistical univariate method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modelling demand for crude oil products in Spain

This paper develops an econometric model for the five most important crude oil products demand in Spain. The aim is the estimation of a range of elasticities of such demands that would serve as the basis for an applied general equilibrium model used for forecasting energy demand in a broader framework. The main distinctive features of the system with respect to previous literature are (i) it takes advantage of monthly information coming from very different information sources and (ii) multivariate unobserved components (UC) models are implemented allowing for a separate analysis of long- and short-run relations. UC models decompose time series into a number of unobserved though economic meaningful components mainly trend, seasonal and irregular. A module is added to such structure to take into account the influence of exogenous variables necessary to compute price, cross and income elasticities. Since all models implemented are multivariate in nature, the demand components are allowed to interact among them through the system noises (similar to a seemingly unrelated equations model). The results show unambiguously that the main factor driving demand is real income with prices having little impact on energy consumption.

Aggregate hedge funds’ flows and returns

In this article, a multivariate unobserved components model for returns and net inflows into hedge funds is employed to assess whether the flows of funds into the industry are dynamically related to returns. The econometric model is used to estimate expected flows and expected returns as unobserved components. The results point to strong autocorrelation in both flows and returns and to positive correlation between past returns and future flows, while the evidence concerning the linkage between past flows and future returns is mixed.

Estimating potential output and the output gap for the euro area: a model-based production function approach

This paper provides an analysis of multivariate unobserved components models for the estimation of potential output and the output gap in the euro area. Bivariate models of output and inflation and multivariate model-based implementations of the production function approach are considered; according to the latter potential output is derived from the permanent components of the factors of production consistent with stable inflation, whereas the output gap results from the combination of the transitory components. This approach allows to measure the contribution of the various factors of production to potential output growth, and to assess the reliability of the output gap estimates. Various alternative statistical specifications for the separation of trend and cycle are considered entertaining different economic hypotheses. The paper also provides an assessment of the reliability of the alternative output gap estimates and analyses their predictive validity by means of a rolling forecast exercise that provides an evaluation of the capability to forecast future inflation.

The Dynamics of the Permanent and Transitory Components in International Business Cycles

This paper proposes a generalized multivariate framework to measure the significance of common permanent and transitory components in international business cycle fluctuations. I employ a multivariate unobserved components model with Markov regime switching to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of permanent and transitory components that are common across G7 real GDP series. The common components are modeled to exhibit different behavior in the expansion and recession phases of international business cycles. I find that, in contrast to the individual country's business cycles, the international business cycle does not exhibit classical recession and expansion phases. The international permanent component has two phases: a high-growth phase and a low-growth phase, and there is no evidence of a Friedman's pluck type recessionary period in the international transitory component. The switch from a high-growth regime to a low-growth regime occurs in the second quarter of 1973. There are no further switches that occur from one regime to the other. Among the seven developed nations examined, Japan is the most sensitive and Germany is the least sensitive to international permanent shocks.

Using Additional Infomation in Estimating Output Gap in Peru: A Multivariate Unobserved Component Approach

One of the key elements for inflation targeting regime is the right identification of inflationary or disinflationary pressures through the output gap. In this paper we provide an estimation of the Peruvian output gap using a multivariate unobserved component (MUC) model, relying on an explicit short run relation between the output gap and inflation rate (Phillips Curve) and structural restrictions over output dynamics. The results show that the MUC output gap estimate is less sensible to end of sample problems and exhibits closer dynamics with the inflation process than the standard output gap estimates.

Searching for the natural rate of interest: a euro area perspective

A time-varying natural rate of interest is estimated for the euro area using a multivariate unobserved components model. The problem of aggregating interest rate data for the pre-EMU period is directly addressed, and a simple method is proposed in order to adjust the risk premia in the interest rate data prior to 1999. We show that, for the pre-EMU period, using risk-unadjusted policy rates leads to periods of high risk premia being erroneously taken as monetary policy replies to the output gap; in contrast, using risk-adjusted policy rates yields an estimate of the reaction of monetary policy to the output gap corresponding approximately to an increase of 40 basis points for a 1%positive deviation of output from potential output. A positive deviation of inflation from its trend of 1%is estimated to have triggered an approximately 1.2%increase in short-term interest rates.

A Multivariate Unobserved Components Model of Cyclical Activity

This paper presents results from the estimation of a multivariate unobserved components model of cyclical activity. The model is motivated by a desire to let the data speak as much as possible, and hence to avoid imposing ad hoc and unjustifiable assumptions about trends and cycles. Estimated over the period 1970:1 to 1999:3 via the Kalman filter and maximum likelihood, the model identifies a common, trend-reverting component to real output, unemployment and capacity utilisation. The structure of the model allows an interesting factor interpretation to be put on the estimate of the output gap. These estimates are consistent with priors, but there is no consistent match to any one simple smoother such as the HP filter.

Volatility of Interest Rates in the Euro Area: Evidence from High Frequency Data

This paper estimate the factors underlying the volatility of the euro overnight interest rate and its transmission along the euro area money market yield curve. A new multivariate unobserved components model is proposed allowing for both long-memory and stationary cyclical dynamics. Using hourly data the estimates show repetitive intradaily and monthly patterns that can be explained by the microstructure of the money market and the institutional features of the Eurosystem's operational framework for monetary policy implementation. Strong persistence is dedected in all log-volatility processes and two common long-memory factors are extracted. The first factor explains the long-memory dynamics of the shortest maturity. The second factor explains the transmission of volatility along the money market yield curve. We find evidence that most liquidity effects are cyclical, confined to the ned of reserve maintenance periods, and are not transmitted along the money market yield curve. JEL Classification: C32, E43, F30, G10