In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which …nancial development no longer has a positive eect on economic growth. We use dierent empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be "too much" …nance. In particular, our results suggest that …nance starts having a negative eect on output growth when credit to the private sector reaches 100% of GDP. We show that our results are consistent with the "vanishing eect" of …nancial development and that they are not driven by output volatility, banking crises, low institutional quality, or by dierences in bank regulation and supervision.

Too much finance

We introduce imperfect creditor protection in a multi-country version of Schumpeterian growth theory with technology transfer. The theory predicts that the growth rate of any country with more than some critical level of financial development will converge to the growth rate of the world technology frontier, and that all other countries will have a strictly lower long-run growth rate. The theory also predicts that in a country that converges to the frontier growth rate, financial development has a positive but eventually vanishing effect on steady-state per-capita GDP relative to the frontier. We present cross-country evidence supporting these two implications. In particular, we find a significant and sizeable effect of an interaction term between initial per-capita GDP (relative to the United States) and a financial intermediation measure in an otherwise standard growth regression, implying that the likelihood of converging to the U.S. growth rate increases with financial development. We also find that, as predicted by the theory, the direct effect of financial intermediation in this regression is not significantly different from zero. These findings are robust to alternative conditioning sets, estimation procedures and measures of financial development.

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The Effect of Financial Development on Convergence: Theory and Evidence

Does one size fit all?: a reexamination of the finance and growth relationship

This study provides new evidence on the relationship between finance and economic growth using an innovative dynamic panel threshold technique. The sample consists of 87 developed and developing countries. The empirical results indicate that there is a threshold effect in the finance–growth relationship. In particular, we find that the level of financial development is beneficial to growth only up to a certain threshold; beyond the threshold level further development of finance tends to adversely affect growth. These findings reveal that more finance is not necessarily good for economic growth and highlight that an “optimal” level of financial development is more crucial in facilitating growth.

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Does too much finance harm economic growth

relationship. All subsequent studies confirmed it (see for example King and Levine, 1993, and the review in: Pagano, 1993). Goldsmith used a sample of 35 countries for the period between 1860 and 1963 to show the relationship between income and financial depth measured by the ratio between bank's assets and GDP. He also showed that in periods of rapid growth, financial depth grows faster than income. More details about measuring financial depth can be found in this paper. FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH Velimir Šonje

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Financial development and economic growth

We examine the extent, causes and consequences of the use of foreign currency as a co-circulating medium of exchange and store of value in Latin America Using new estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation in the form of US dollars, we obtain unique measures of currency substitution, asset substitution, dollarization, and bank credibility for many Latin American countries We also specify and estimate demand functions for foreign currency in circulation in Argentina in order to examine the dynamic consequences of network externalities for hysteresis and irreversibility

Unofficial Dollarization in Latin America: Currency Substitution, Network Externalities and Irreversibility

U radu se pomocu "network externalities modela" pokazuje da jednom kada neslužbena dolarizacija prijeđe određenu razinu ona postaje prakticki ireverzibilna.

Unofficial Dollarization in Latin America: Currency Substitution, Network Externalities, and Irreversibility

This paper employs new estimates of US currency held abroad to determine the degree of unofficial or de facto dollarization that has taken place in key countries around the world. Empirical estimates of foreign currency in circulation permits refined definitions of unofficial dollarization indices as well as new measures of currency and asset substitution and bank credibility indices. The new unofficial dollarization indices are compared to the commonly used IMF dollarization measures and are shown to be superior. The paper then examines the problem of estimating the unobserved amounts of European currencies [particularly the Deutsche mark (DM)] that circulate as second currencies in many Central and Eastern European nations. A denomination displacement method and a money demand method are employed to estimate the unobserved quantity of DM circulating in Croatia. The final section calls attention to the importance of monitoring the historic experiment that will take place when the Euro currency is introduced on January 1, 2002. In particular, it calls for a data collection mechanism capable of measuring the extent to which the new Euro currency substitutes for the local currencies of Central and Eastern European transition countries.

Currency Substitution, Unoffical Dollarization and Estimates of Foreign Currency Held Abroad: The Case of Croatia

Traditional statistical tests of serial independence of stock price changes often show that stock markets are inefficient. Our analysis on daily and monthly data confirms this finding for the Croatian and U.S. markets in the 2002-2010 period. However, this result seems to be mainly due to the impact of the crisis of 2008-2009. The observation of monthly data in the pre-crisis period suggests market efficiency in the U.S. and (rather surprisingly) in Croatia also. Daily data indicate a high degree of efficiency of the US stock market before the crisis, but it is impossible to conclude with a satisfying level of confidence that the Croatian market was inefficient in that period. Furthermore, an elementary moving average crossover trading system beats the CROBEX and S&P 500 indices from 1997 to 2010, indicating market inefficiency. Still, if the same trading rule is applied to the S&P 500 index in an extended time period between 1950 and 2010, the conclusion about market inefficiency becomes less convincing. It seems that (in)efficiency varies both across markets and in the same markets in the long run, but it still remains unknown which processes are the driving factors behind these changes.

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Velimir Šonje

Papers

Financial development and economic growth

Unofficial Dollarization in Latin America: Currency Substitution, Network Externalities and Irreversibility

Unofficial Dollarization in Latin America: Currency Substitution, Network Externalities, and Irreversibility

Currency Substitution, Unoffical Dollarization and Estimates of Foreign Currency Held Abroad: The Case of Croatia

Efficient market hypothesis: is the Croatian stock market as (in)efficient as the U.S. market