Mapping COVID-19: Follow-up

As a follow up to our previous blog entry describing how to import Covid-19 data into EViews and produce some maps/graphs of the data, this post will produce a couple more graphs similar to ones we've seen become popular across social media in recent days.

Mapping COVID-19

With the world currently experiencing the Covid-19 crisis, many of our users are working remotely (aside: for details on how to use EViews at home, visit our Covid licensing page) anxious to follow data on how the virus is spreading across parts of the world. There are many sources of information on Covid-19, and we thought we’d demonstrate how to fetch some of these sources directly into EViews, and then display some graphics of the data. (Please visit our follow up post for a few more graph examples).

Beveridge-Nelson Filter

Authors and guest post by Benjamin Wong (Monash University) and Davaajargal Luvsannyam (The Bank of Mongolia)

Analysis of macroeconomic time series often involves decomposing a series into a trend and cycle components. In this blog post, we describe the Kamber, Morley, and Wong (2018) Beveridge-Nelson (BN) filter and the associated EViews add-in.

Sign and Zero Restricted VAR Add-In

Authors and guest post by Davaajargal Luvsannyam and Ulziikhutag Munkhtsetseg

In our previous blog entry, we discussed the sign restricted VAR (SRVAR) add-in for EViews. Here, we will discuss imposing a further zero restrictions on the impact period of the impulse response function (IRF) using the ARW and SRVAR add-ins in tandem.

Dealing with the log of zero in regression models

Author and guest post by Eren Ocakverdi

The title of this blog piece is a verbatim excerpt from the Bellego and Pape (2019) paper suggested by Professor David E. Giles in his October reading list. (Editor's note: Professor Giles has recently announced the end of his blog - it is a fantastic resource and will be missed!). The topic is immediately familiar to practitioners who occasionally encounter the difficulty in applied work. In this regard, it is reassuring that the frustration is being addressed and that there is indeed an ongoing quest for the silver bullet.

Sign Restricted VAR Add-In

Authors and guest post by Davaajargal Luvsannyam and Ulziikhutag Munkhtsetseg

Nowadays, sign restricted VARs (SRVARs) are becoming popular and can be considered as an indispensable tool for macroeconomic analysis. They have been used for macroeconomic policy analysis when investigating the sources of business cycle fluctuations and providing a benchmark against which modern dynamic macroeconomic theories are evaluated. Traditional structural VARs are identified with the exclusion restriction which is sometimes difficult to justify by economic theory. In contrast, SRVARs can easily identify structural shocks since in many cases, economic theory only offers guidance on the sign of structural impulse responses on impact.

Pyeviews update: now compatible with Python 3

If you’re a user of both EViews and Python, then you may already be aware of pyeviews (if not, take a look at our original blog post here or our whitepaper here). 

Pyeviews has been updated and is now compatible with Python 3. We’ve also added support for numpy structured arrays and several additional time series frequencies. 

You can get these updates through pip:

pip install pyeviews

Through the conda-forge channel in Anaconda:

conda install pyeviews -c conda-forge

Or by typing:

python setup.py install

in your installation directory.