Release of Dynare 4.2.2

The Windows package is already available for download at the official Dynare website. The Mac and Linux packages should follow soon.

All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

This release is compatible with MATLAB versions ranging from 7.0 (R14) to 7.13 (R2011b) and with GNU Octave versions ranging from 3.0 to 3.4.

Here is a list of the problems identified in version 4.2.1 and that have been fixed in version 4.2.2:

• The secondary rank test following the order test of the Blanchard and Kahn condition was faulty and almost never triggered
• The variance prior for BVAR “à la Sims” with only one lag was inconsistent.  The solution implemented consists of adding one extra observation in the presample used to compute the prior; as a consequence, the numerical results for all estimations will be slightly different in future releases (thanks to Marek Jarociński for spotting this)
• The `conditional_forecast' command was buggy: it was always using the posterior mode, whatever the value of the `parameter_set' option
• `STEADY_STATE' was not working correctly with certain types of expressions (the priority of the addition and substraction operators was incorrectly handled)
• With the `block' option of `model', the preprocessor was failing on expressions of the form "a^b" (with no endogenous in "a" but an endogenous in "b")
• Some native MATLAB statements were not correctly passed on to MATLAB (e.g.  x = { 'foo' 'bar' } )
• `external_function' was crashing in some circumstances
• The lambda parameter for HP filter was restricted to integer values for no good reason
• The `load_mh_file' option of `estimation' was crashing under Octave for Windows (MinGW version)
• Computation of steady state was failing on model contains auxiliary variables created by leads or lags larger than 2 or by of the `EXPECTATION' operator
• Compilation of MEX files for MATLAB was failing with GCC 4.6