We consider an adaptive importance sampling approach to estimating the marginal likelihood, a quantity that is fundamental in Bayesian model comparison and Bayesian model averaging. This approach is motivated by the difficulty of obtaining an accurate estimate through existing algorithms that...

Various papers have identified shocks to investment as major drivers of output, investment, hours, and interest rates. These investment shocks have been linked to financial frictions because financial markets are instrumental in transforming consumption goods into installed capital. However, the...

The empirical support for a DSGE type of real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure that makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. The linear VAR model is extended to...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of U.S. inflation and the average inflation predictions of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on a sample running from 1968Q4 to 2014Q2. The joint data generating process (DGP) of these data consists of the unobserved components (UC) model of Stock...

The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...

This paper generalizes the popular stochastic volatility in mean model of Koopman and Hol Uspensky (2002) to allow for time-varying parameters in the conditional mean. The estimation of this extension is nontrival since the volatility appears in both the conditional mean and the conditional...

A regime switching skew-normal model for financial crisis and contagion is proposed in which we develop a new class of multiple-channel crisis and contagion tests. Crisis channels are measured through changes in 'own' moments of the mean, variance and skewness, while contagion is through changes...

Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the...

We introduce a new class of models that has both stochastic volatility and moving average errors, where the conditional mean has a state space representation. Having a moving average component, however, means that the errors in the measurement equation are no longer serially independent, and...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. In particular, a popular metric for comparing stochastic volatility models is the DIC based on the conditional likelihood—obtained by conditioning on the latent variables. However, some recent studies...