My thanks to those who emailed comments and suggestions for my ‘mfx’ function, I’m happy that I could fill a void for some people. I also received a request/suggestion from Tony Cookson, along with a helpful fix for a bug in the code, to include an option that ... [Read more...]

Although this blog’s primary focus is time series, one feature I missed from Stata was the simple marginal effects command, ‘mfx compute’, for cross-sectional work, and I could not find an adequate replacement in R. To bridge this gap, I’ve written a (rather messy) R function to produce ... [Read more...]

This post examines conditional heteroskedasticity models in the context of daily stock price data for Allied Irish Banks (AIB), specifically how to test for conditional heteroskedasticity in a series, how to approach model specification and estimation when time-varying volatility is present, and how to forecast with these models; all of ... [Read more...]

As a follow-up to my post examining the stationarity of the new property price index, this post will briefly look at some of the dynamics of mortgage debt and property prices; all data is monthly, from the beginning of 2005 to March 2011. This will also serve as an illustration of the ‘... [Read more...]

On Friday, the CSO released a new house (and apartment) price index, for the national, Dublin, and national excluding Dublin regions. The release has been noted and covered by the great Irish Economy and Namawinelake blogs. I want to briefly look at some of the statistical properties of this series ... [Read more...]

One prominent feature of early degree-level macroeconomics courses is the concept of ‘potential output’, which one could roughly define as the level of output (GDP) at which inflation is not ‘accelerating’. Potential output is of interest to macroeconomists when analysing the question of output gaps and macroeconomic stabilisation policies by ... [Read more...]