We study the statistical properties of heterogeneous agent models. Using aBewley-Hugget-Aiyagari model we compute the density function of wealth and in-come and use it for likelihood inference. We study the finite sample properties of themaximum likelihood estimator (MLE) using Monte Carlo...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values, implying that the underlying distribution has heavy tails. This may result in infinite variances as well as higher-order moments and bias the commonly used least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose an estimation...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The obtained time series are...

In self-reported data usually a phenomenon called 'heaping' occurs, i.e. survey participants round the values of their income, weight or height to some degree. Additionally, respondents may be more prone to round off or up due to social desirability. By ignoring the heaping process a severe bias...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...

In this paper we ‘update’ the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second,...

This paper studies asymmetry in economic activity over the business cycle. It develops a tractable multisector model of the economy in which complementarity across inputs causes aggregate activity to be left skewed with countercyclical volatility. We then examine implications of the model...

We propose methods for constructing regularized mixtures of density forecasts. We explore a variety of objectives and regularization penalties, and we use them in a substantive exploration of Eurozone inflation and real interest rate density forecasts. All individual inflation forecasters (even...