We develop a model for museum visits and estimate it on a large sample of holders of a museum card that provides free access to all museums. Our model distinguishes two stages, referring to the determination of the number of trips and destination choice and can deal with an effect of income on...

The effects of a policy measure often reach the consumer only after one or more intermediate steps, for instance because the measure lowers the cost of an input for an industry producing a consumer good. This paper is concerned with the question how to measure such indirect effects correctly...

Uncertainty about the future preferences of the government may induce policy makers to run excessive budget deficits. As a solution to this problem, economists have proposed to impose a binding debt rule. In this paper we argue that a binding debt rule does not eliminate the distortions due to...

The linear Gaussian state space model for which the common variance is treated as a stochastic time-varying variable is considered for the modelling of economic time series. The focus of this paper is on the simultaneous estimation of parameters related to the stochastic processes of the mean...

We propose a new class of observation driven time series models referred to as Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) models. The driving mechanism of the GAS model is the scaled score of the likelihood function. This approach provides a unified and consistent framework for introducing...

We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...

This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the A rated journal 'Journal of Business and Economic Statistics'.<p>

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

We propose a new approach to the modelling of the term structure of interest rates. We consider the general dynamic factor model and show how to impose smoothness restrictions on the factor loadings. We further present a statistical procedure based on Wald tests that can be used to find a...

We introduce a statistical test for comparing the predictive accuracy of competing copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts, based on the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC). The test is valid under general conditions: in particular it allows for parameter estimation...