Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, RCEF 2012: Cities, Open Economies, and Public Policy

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Moving Average Stochastic Volatility Models with Application to Inflation Forecast

Joshua Chan*

Last modified: 2012-06-01

Abstract


Moving average and stochastic volatility are two important components for modeling and forecasting macroeconomic and financial time series. The former aims to capture short-run dynamics, whereas the latter allows for volatility clustering and time-varying volatility. We introduce a new class of models that includes both of these useful features. The new modelsallow the conditional mean process to have a state space form. As such, this general framework includes a wide varietyof popular specifications, including the unobserved components and time-varying parameter models. Having a moving average process, however, means that the errors in the measurement equation are no longer serially independent, and estimation becomes more difficult. We develop a posterior simulator that builds upon recent advances in precision-based algorithms for estimating this new class of models. In an empirical application involving U.S. inflation we find that these moving average stochastic volatility models provide better in-sample fitness and out-of-sample forecast performance than the standard variants with only stochastic volatility.

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