We propose a novel statistic to test the rank of a matrix. The rank statistic overcomes deficiencies of existing rank statistics, like: necessity of a Kronecker covariance matrix for the canonical correlation rank statistic of Anderson (1951), sensitivity to the ordering of the variables for the...

This paper considers two models to deal with an outcome variable that contains a large fraction of zeros, such as individual expenditures on health care: a sample-selection model and a two-part model. The sample-selection model uses two possibly correlated processes to determine the outcome: a...

This paper shows how a high level matrix programming language may be used to perform Monte Carlo simulation, bootstrapping, estimation by maximum likelihood and GMM, and kernel regression in parallel on symmetric multiprocessor computers or clusters of workstations. The implementation of...

The performance of Monte Carlo integration methods like importance-sampling or Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo procedures depends greatly on the choice of the importance- or candidate-density. Such a density must typically be "close" to the target density to yield numerically accurate results with...

Adaptive radial-based direction sampling (ARDS) algorithms are specified for Bayesian analysis of models with nonelliptical, possibly, multimodal target distributions. A key step is a radial-based transformation to directions and distances. After the transformations a Metropolis-Hastings method...

Likelihoods and posteriors of instrumental variable regression models with strong endogeneity and/or weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This may seriously affect inference based on Bayesian credible sets. When approximating such contours using...

The performance of Monte Carlo integration methods like importance sampling or Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures greatly depends on the choice of the importance or candidate density. Usually, such a density has to be "close" to the target density in order to yield numerically accurate results...

Likelihoods and posteriors of econometric models with strong endogeneity and weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This feature also holds for cointegration models when near non-stationarity occurs and determining the number of cointegrating...

Adaptive Polar Sampling (APS) is proposed as a Markov chain Monte Carlo method for Bayesian analysis of models with ill-behaved posterior distributions. In order to sample efficiently from such a distribution, a location-scale transformation and a transformation to polar coordinates are used....

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics: improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal:...