The main objective of this paper is to study the relationship between external public debt and equilibrium real exchange rate in developing countries. Using a extension of Obstfeld & Rogoff (1995) model we show that debt overhang tend to appreciate real exchange rate in the long run (Krugman...

In 1996, Propp and Wilson introduced coupling from the past (CFTP), an algorithm for generating a sample from the exact stationary distribution of a Markov chain. In 1998, Fill proposed another so–called perfect sampling algorithm. These algorithms have enormous potential in Markov Chain Monte...

This paper analyzes the special features of electricity spot prices derived from the physics of this commodity and from the economics of supply and demand in a market pool. Besides mean-reversion, a property they share with other commodities, power prices exhibit the unique feature of spikes in...

We consider the probabilistic numerical scheme for fully nonlinear PDEs suggested in [12], and show that it can be introduced naturally as a combination of Monte Carlo and finite differences scheme without appealing to the theory of backward stochastic differential equations. Our first main...

Reversible jump methods are the most commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo tool for exploring variable dimension statistical models. Recently, however, an alternative approach based on birth-and-death processes has been proposed by Stephens for mixtures of distributions. We show that the...

We consider the generic problem of performing sequential Bayesian inference in a state-space model with observation process y, state process x and fixed parameter theta. An idealized approach would be to apply the iterated batch importance sampling (IBIS) algorithm of Chopin (2002). This is a...

The choice of the summary statistics in Bayesian inference and in particular in ABC algorithms is paramount to produce a valid outcome. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on those statistics for the corresponding Bayes factor to be convergent, namely to asymptotically select the true...

The Wang-Landau algorithm aims at sampling from a probability distribution, while penalizing some regions of the state space and favouring others. It is widely used, but its convergence properties are still unknown. We show that for some variations of the algorithm, the Wang-Landau algorithm...

We consider the discretized version of a (continuous-time) two-factor model introduced by Benth and coauthors for the electricity markets. For this model, the underlying is the exponent of a sum of independent random variables. We provide and test an algori thm, which is based on the celebrated...

Casella and Robert (1996) presented a general Rao--Blackwellisation principle for accept-reject and Metropolis-Hastings schemes that leads to significant decreases in the variance of the resulting estimators, but at a high cost in computing and storage. Adopting a completely different...