Dynare 6.1 Released

Posted on 02 May 2024

We are pleased to announce the release of Dynare 6.1.

This maintenance release fixes various bugs.

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

This release is compatible with MATLAB versions ranging from 9.5 (R2018b) to 24.1 (R2024a), and with GNU Octave versions ranging from 7.1.0 to 9.1.0 (NB: the Windows package requires version 9.1.0 specifically).

Here is a list of the problems identified in version 6.0 and that have been fixed in version 6.1:

  • Identification: simulated moments were triggered instead of theoretical ones
  • Variance decompositions would crash with measurement errors when zero variance shocks were present
  • The handling of Lagrange multipliers in the display of problems with the Jacobian was wrong
  • The option auxname was missing in the documentation of the pac_model command
  • PAC equation estimation/simulation was crashing in the case of composite target
  • The PAC equation estimation would crash if the PAC target was a transformed variable
  • The perfect_foresight_with_expectation_errors_solver command could return incorrect results when used in conjunction with homotopy_linearization_fallback or homotopy_marginal_linearization_fallback options
  • For scalar values, the description of the horizon option of the var_expectation_model command was incorrect
  • The steady state computation with the bytecode option in a Ramsey model was broken
  • OccBin: the piecewise Kalman filter would crash in case of a periodic solution
  • The heteroskedastic_filter option of the estimation command would cause a crash if there was only one shock
  • The method_of_moments command would crash during the J-test for just and underidentified models
  • User-defined warning settings were internally overwritten with the method_of_moments command or the piecewise Kalman filter
  • The SMC sampler would crash if any of the bayesian_irf, moments_varendo, or smoother options of the estimation command had been specified
  • The bvar_irf command would ignore the SquareRoot option and instead employ a Cholesky decomposition
  • The univariate Kalman filter erroneously treated observations with negative prediction variances due to numerical issues as missing values instead of discarding the parameter draw

Moreover, a new homotopy_exclude_varexo option to the perfect_foresight_solver command has been added, to exclude some exogenous variables from the homotopy procedure (i.e. to keep them at their value corresponding to 100% of the shock during all homotopy iterations).

As a reminder, the list of new features introduced in versions 6.x can be found in the release notes for 6.0.