Dynare 5.4 Released

Posted on 22 March 2023

We are pleased to announce the release of Dynare 5.4.

This maintenance release fixes various bugs.

The Windows, macOS and source packages are already available for download at the Dynare website.

All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

This release is compatible with MATLAB versions ranging from 8.3 (R2014a) to 9.14 (R2023a), and with GNU Octave version 8.1.0 (under Windows).

Note for macOS users with an Apple Silicon processor, and who are also MATLAB users: the official MATLAB version for use on those processors is still the Intel version (running through Rosetta 2), so the official Dynare package for download on our website is built for Intel only. However, since Mathworks has released a beta version of MATLAB for Apple Silicon, we created a beta package of Dynare that you can try with it. See this forum thread for more details: https://forum.dynare.org/t/testers-wanted-release-of-dynare-5-x-beta-for-apple-silicon-m1-m2-chips/20499

Here is a list of the problems identified in version 5.3 and that have been fixed in version 5.4:

  • Files installed through the Windows installer had too weak permissions and could be modified by unpriviledged local users, if the default installation location (c:\dynare\) had been chosen
  • Estimation:
    • the load_results_after_load_mh option would not find the location of the results file
    • the computation of prior/posterior statistics would crash if the value of the filter step_ahead option was greater than 1 without requesting a forecast or the smoother
    • NaN or complex parameters returned by steady state files were not correctly handled
    • analytical_derivation could be triggered with endogenous_prior but would not take the endogenous prior into account for the Jacobian and Hessian
  • OccBin:
    • running the calib_smoother command with smoother_inversion_filter would crash unless likelihood_inversion_filter was also specified
    • running the piecewise Kalman smoother would crash if an error was encountered during computation of the decision rules
  • PAC equation estimation through iterative OLS would crash if the auxiliary model contained a constant
  • The variable label was incorrect for leads and lags of exogenous variables in the display of decision rules and in the model_info command
  • Declaring a trend_var variable while not having a var(deflator=...) statement would cause the preprocessor to crash
  • Macro processor: error messages following a @#define, @#include or @#includepath directive could in some cases point to a line number off by 1
  • Perfect foresight simulations: the debug option would not preserve sparsity, causing out of memory errors

As a reminder, the list of new features introduced in versions 5.x can be found in the release notes for 5.0.