Release of Dynare 5.5

Info
1

We are pleased to announce the release of Dynare 5.5.

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 23.2 (R2023b), and with GNU Octave version 8.3.0 (under Windows).

Note for macOS users with an Apple Silicon processor: this is the first Dynare release that comes with native Apple Silicon (arm64) support under MATLAB. Please download the corresponding package, to be used with MATLAB R2023b for Apple Silicon.

Here is a list of the problems identified in version 5.4 and that have been fixed in version 5.5:

  • In a stochastic context, results could be incorrect if an endogenous with a lead ⩾ 2 or an exogenous with a lead ⩾ 1 appeared in the argument(s) of a call to a (nonlinear) external function
  • With the use_dll option of the model block, the expression sign(x) would evaluate to ±1 instead of 0 if x=0
  • If the guess value given to the steady command was such that the residuals were all below tolerance, except some that are NaN, then this guess value was incorrectly accepted as the solution to the steady state problem
  • The method_of_moments command with GMM was ignoring the analytic_standard_errors option when using mode_compute=4
  • Homotopy with the extended_path command at order=0 was broken
  • The parallel_use_psexec command-line option was ignored
  • With the bytecode option of the model block, using the operators abs(),
    cbrt() and sign() would lead to a crash
  • The fast command-line option was broken under MATLAB with Windows
  • Ramsey steady state computation could fail if an expectation or diff operator was present in the model
  • A crash could occur if some external function call was present in an auxiliary variable
  • The endogenous_prior option of the estimation command could erroneously display a warning message about missing observations
  • The model_comparison command would crash if the .mod file name had less than four characters
  • The shock_decomposition command would overwrite previously stored smoother results
  • The x13 interface in dseries did not handle missing values, particularly at the beginning of a series
  • The x13 interface in dseries would occasionally crash under Windows with segmentation violations
  • OccBin: estimation would crash if a previous shocks(surprise) simulation was conducted
  • The internals command would not find the location of the _results.mat file
  • The prior optimize command would not work with mode_compute=5

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