How Much Structure in Empirical Models?

November 16-17, 2007

The conference brought together macroeconometricians and applied macroeconomists from the US and Europe to discuss issues connected with the estimation of structural economic models, their evaluation and their use for policy analyses. The main topics examined during the conference were the links between structural models and vector autoregressions, the contribution of intangible capital to the productivity revival of the 1990s, the relative merits of different applied methodologies for important economic questions, the relationships between statistical and economic identifiability, structural estimation with Markov switching or time varying parameters, sources of dynamic fluctuations in models with different features. Academic, private banks and central banks economists attended the conference. Representative from local universities (UAB and IEA), local institutions (La Caixa) and from the Bank of Spain were present.

Program

List of participants

Pictures

Working papers available