This paper examines the long-run trends in per-capita income across the US states (1929-2005). Our analysis advocates and implements a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), in order to investigate whether disparities in per-capita income embody a stable long-run relation. The empirical...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have become important tools to promote a variety of public goals and policies. In the past years much attention has been given to the expected social benefits from deploying ICT in different fields (transportation, education, public participation...

Despite a busy lifestyle – or perhaps as a result of a stressful lifestyle – more people than ever before make leisure trips, sometimes for a long time but in many cases just for short periods. Modern telecommunication technology brings attractive tourist destinations directly into the...

This paper presents the R-package <B>MitISEM</B> (mixture of <I>t</I> by importance sampling weighted expectation maximization) which provides an automatic and flexible two-stage method to approximate a non-elliptical target density kernel -- typically a posterior density kernel -- using an adaptive mixture...</i></b>

This paper presents the R package MitISEM, which provides an automatic and flexible method to approximate a non-elliptical target density using adaptive mixtures of Student-t densities, where only a kernel of the target density is required. The approximation can be used as a candidate density in...

We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECDcountries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR with an informative priorbased on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben-efits and labour taxes so that our identification is not affected by the Faust...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Econometric Reviews</I>. Vol. 33(1-4), 3-35.<P> We discuss Bayesian inferential procedures within the family of instrumental variables regression models and focus on two issues: existence conditions for posterior moments of the parameters of interest...</p></i>

We propose a new methodology for designing flexible proposal densities for the joint posterior density of parameters and states in a nonlinear non-Gaussian state space model. We show that a highly efficient Bayesian procedure emerges when these proposal densities are used in an independent...