Hidden Markov models have been applied in many different fields during the last decades, including econometrics and finance. However, the lion’s share of the investigated models is Markovian mixtures of Gaussian distributions. We present an extension to conditional t-distributions, including...

In the late 1990s many European countries started comprehensive restructuring of their energy industries, the typical ingredients of the reforms are full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration, liberalization. In this paper we focus on the way in which energy sector reforms affect...

Although many studies have addressed poverty in Brazil, very few of them have analyzed the dynamic nature of this phenomenon. In order to fill this gap, this Working Paper seeks to identify the features that determine the permanence of poverty and the downward mobility into poverty of adults in...

Although many studies addressed poverty issues, very few of then did analyze the transient or persistent nature of this phenomenon. Encouraged by this lack of dynamic poverty analyses, the objective of this paper is to evaluate which features determine the relative position and the dynamics of...

Hidden Markov models have been applied in many different fields, including econometrics and finance. However, the lion's share of the investigated models concerns Markovian mixtures of Gaussian distributions. We present an extension to conditional t-distributions, including models with unequal...

In the late 1990s many European countries started comprehensive restructuring of their energy industries. The typical ingredients of the reforms are full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration, liberalization. In this paper we focus on the way in which energy sector reforms affect...