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...

What is a 'sustainable nation' and how can we identify and rank 'sustainable nations'? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of sustainability: the...

A class of adaptive sampling methods is introduced for efficient posterior and predictive simulation. The proposed methods are robust in the sense that they can handle target distributions that exhibit non-elliptical shapes such as multimodality and skewness. The basic method makes use of...

We propose a multivariate combination approach to prediction based on a distributional state space representation of the weights belonging to a set of Bayesian predictive densities which have been obtained from alternative models. Several specifications of multivariate time-varying weights are...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

We summarize the general combination approach by Billio et al. [2010]. In the combination model the weights follow logistic auto-regressive processes, change over time and their dynamics are possible driven by the past forecasting performances of the predictive densities. For illustrative...

In simple static linear simultaneous equation models the empirical distributions of IV and OLS are examined under alternative sampling schemes and compared with their first-order asymptotic approximations. We demonstrate that the limiting distribution of consistent IV is not affected by...

An efficient and accurate approach is proposed for forecasting Value at Risk [VaR] and Expected Shortfall [ES] measures in a Bayesian framework. This consists of a new adaptive importance sampling method for Quantile Estimation via Rapid Mixture of lt;Igt;tlt;/Igt; approximations [QERMit]. As a...

In the 1980s and 1990s, disability benefit rates in the Netherlands were among the highest in the world. However, since the beginning of this century the number of disability cases has dropped remarkably due to some very successful policy reforms. An administrative dataset of Dutch disability...

We consider the question whether top tennis players in a top tournament (Wimbledon) employ an optimal (efficient) service strategy. We show that top players do not, in general, follow an optimal strategy, and we provide a lower bound of the inefficiency. The inefficiency regarding winning a...