Talk at R/Rmetrics Singapore Conference 2010 on measurement of the exchange rate regime

Anmol Sethy will do a talk on our work on testing, dating and monitoring exchange rate regimes at the R/Rmetrics Singapore Conference 2010, including some recent progress on parallel computation. For background, see this paper, which talks about the ideas, and the open source R package fxregime. This is now fairly mature work: many of the papers at the NIPFP DEA Program website have utilised the ideas and code. The 6th meeting of the NIPFP-DEA Research Program (9 and 10 March) is going to have interesting new work in this field.

Come work for us

Come work for the NIPFP-DEA Research Program:

We are looking for people with a Masters or a Ph.D. with an economics / econometrics / statistics background with an interest in the fields visible in the above URL. Computer programming skills, ideally in R or matlab, are desirable.

Please send your resume to Anurodh Sharma : anurodh54 at gmail dot com.

Seminar by Paul Levine: Monetary Policy in an Uncertain World

Please join us for this seminar: 5 PM on 25th January (Monday), at NIPFP, followed by snacks on the NIPFP lawns.

Working group on foreign investment

MOF has setup a working group on foreign investment where the NIPFP DEA Program will be involved.

5th research meeting of the NIPFP DEA Research Program

The program is up on the website. This will be on 16 and 17 September.

5th research meeting: 16 and 17 September 2009

On the website, there is a checklist of the papers and speakers of the 5th research meeting, which is scheduled for 16 and 17 September. This URL will show a full fledged conference program, with timeslots and discussants, in a few days.

A new resource in Indian business cycle measurement

In order to make progress on doing macroeconomics in India, one weak link has been business cycle measurement. This, in turn, requires access to a wide range of seasonally adjusted time-series. In most countries, the infrastructure of seasonally adjusted data is produced by the statistical system, but in India this has not come about.

Seasonally adjusted series are particularly important in tracking current developments in the economy. The familiar year-on-year change is the moving average of the latest twelve monthly changes. In order to know what is happening in the economy, it is better to look at recent months, rather than looking back 12 months. The familiar y-o-y changes are a sluggish indicator of what is happening. Month-on-month changes are more informative: but this requires seasonal adjustment.

We have initiated some computation and release at cycle.in

At present, we have a dataset with seasonally adjusted levels for a few time-series. We will be updating this every Monday. At the above URL, you get a sense of what is happening with month-on-month changes of seasonally adjusted data in these series.

In the spirit of creating public goods, we make it easy for you to embed these graphs into your work products. We also have a .csv file with data for levels which can be the foundation of further work.

This will be useful in tracking current developments in the economy, and also make possible research in macroeconomics, which critically requires seasonally adjusted data.

We hope this is useful. Please use the comments on this blog post to give us feedback.