A key ingredient of many particle filters is the use of the sampling importance resampling algorithm (SIR), which transforms a sample of weighted draws from a prior distribution into equally weighted draws from a posterior distribution.  We give a novel analysis of the SIR algorithm and analyse...

This paper considers the costs and benefits of Sweden joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).  We pay particular attention to the costs of abandoning the krona in terms of a loss of monetary policy independence.  For this purpose, we apply a cointegrated VAR framework to...

Despite the emerging consensus on the validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) between trading countries in the long run, empirical evidence in favour of the PPP theory is scarce in data predominantly exposed to real shocks. This paper tests for PPP between Norway and its trading partners using...

Building models for high dimensional portfolios is important in risk management and asset allocation.  Here we propose a novel and fast way of estimating models of time-varying covariances that overcome an undiagnosed incidental parameter problem which has troubled existing methods when applied...

We evaluate the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of direct multi-step estimation (DMS) for forecasting at several horizons. For forecast accuracy gains from DMS in finite samples, mis-specification and non-stationarity of the DGP are necessary, but when a model is well-specified,...

We propose a new measure of risk, based entirely on downward moves measured using high frequency data.  Realised semivariances are shown to have important predictive qualities for future market volatility.  The theory of these new measures is spelt out, drawing on some new results from...

Suppose we wish to carry out likelihood based inference but we solely have an unbiased simulation based estimator of the likelihood.  We note that unbiasedness is enough when the estimated likelihood is used inside a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.  This result has recently been introduced in...

his paper intends to harmonize two different approaches to the analysis of the business cycle and in doing so it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the classical' approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business cycle; we...

In this paper we review the history and recent developments of stochastic volatility, which is the main way financial economists and mathematical finance specialists model time varying volatility.