People
| Faculty and Staff | Ph.D. Students |
Professor of Economics and Department Head
M.A., University of Michigan, Applied Mathematics
M.A., University of Puerto Rico, Mathematics
A.B., Columbia University, Philosophy
Research:
Arturo Estrella has published extensively in various fields within economics, including macroeconomic theory, empirical macroeconomics, monetary policy, financial regulation, econometric theory, applied econometrics, and financial markets, instruments, and institutions. In 1988-89, he developed (with Gikas Hardouvelis) a probit model of the probability of a future recession. Since then, the model has correctly forecasted the last three U.S. recessions in real time with a lead time of about one year and no false positives.
Professor Estrella has also written extensively about financial regulation, proposing in 1995 an innovative system for bank capital regulation that has the potential to prevent systemic problems arising from the failure of large financial institutions. From 1991 to 2001, he represented the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in international negotiations on bank regulation under the auspices of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
In econometrics, Professor Estrella derived a pseudo R-squared for dichotomous dependent variable models that outperforms other alternatives, including the classic McFadden measure. The measure has become part of the standard output in many widely-used econometric packages. He has also provided exact critical and probability values for use in time-series breakpoint tests in connection with generalized method of moments estimates.
Selected Publications:
"Monetary Tightening Cycles and the Predictability of
Economic Activity" With Tobias Adrian, Economics Letters, May 2008.
"Why Does the Yield Curve Predict Output and Inflation?" Economic Journal, July 2005.
"Bank Capital and Risk: Is Voluntary Disclosure Enough?" Journal of Financial Services Research, October 2004.
"Critical Values and P Values of Bessel Process Distributions: Computation and Application to Structural Break Tests" Econometric Theory, December 2003.
"Dynamic Inconsistencies: Counterfactual Implications of a Class of Rational Expectations Models" With Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, American Economic Review, September 2002.