Rui Liu

Associate Professor

Department of Economics

 

Liu

 

Current Research Activities

My research has been in the area of macroeconometrics, which explores time series methods for empirical macroeconomics. In particular, I have been interested in studying factor models to test the predictions of macroeconomic theory and to estimate structural relations in the economy. 

Research Connections to Current Events

One of my in-progress projects concerns nowcasting unemployment in the time of COVID-19. Nowcasting in economics is the prediction of the present, the very near future, and the very recent past state of an economic indicator. The term is a contraction of "now" and "forecasting". It has recently become popular in economics as typical measures used to assess the state of an economy (e.g., gross domestic product (GDP)), are only determined after a long delay and are subject to revision. Nowcasting models have been applied most notably in Central Banks, who use the estimates to monitor the state of the economy in real-time as a proxy for official measures. With this project, I seek to nowcast unemploiyment insurance claims in the time of COVID-19 to monitor the U.S. labor market.

Keywords

Macroeconometrics, MCMC, Bayesian Econometrics

Other Languages

Mandarin Chinese