In this paper, we make use of state space models toinvestigate the presence of stochastic trends in economic time series. Amodel is specified where such a trend can enter either in the autoregressiverepresentation or in a separate state equation. Tests based on the formerare analogous to...

Social interactions are generally thought to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper we exploit detailed friendship nominations in the US Add Health data, and extend the Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR) model to deal with (i) endogenous peer selection, and...

Regions vary strongly according to the participation of firms in R&D activity.By linking data on R&D activity at thefirm level with GIS based data on economic, and other locationfeatures of zoneswe are able to investigate the impactof local factors on R&D involvement for various types of...

We propose a novel Bayesian test under a (noninformative) Jeffreys'priorspecification. We check whether the fixed scalar value of the so-calledBayesian Score Statistic (BSS) under the null hypothesis is aplausiblerealization from its known and standardized distribution under thealternative....

Root cancellation in Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) models leads tolocal non-identification of parameters. When we use diffuse or normal priorson the parameters of the ARMA model, posteriors in Bayesian analyzes show ana posteriori favor for this local non-identification. We show that the...

We construct models which enable a decision-maker to analyze the implications oftypical timeseries patterns of daily exchange rates for currency risk management. Ourapproach is Bayesianwhere extensive use is made of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The effects ofseveral modelcharacteristics...

We obtain invariant expressions for prior probabilities and priors onthe parameters of nested regression models that are induced by aprior on the parameters of an encompassing linear regression model.The invariance is with respect to specifications that satisfy anecessary set of assumptions....

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most realexchange rates as temporary deviations from fixedlong-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibriathemselves, see Engel (2000). We implement thisidea using an unobserved components model and decompose theobservations on...

In a Bayesian analysis, different models can be compared on the basis of theexpected or marginal likelihood they attain. Many methods have been devised to compute themarginal likelihood, but simplicity is not the strongest point of most methods. At the sametime, the precision of methods is often...

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...