The poor performance of macroeconomic models during the great recession of 2008 has forced many economists to re-examine macroeconomic theories, and search for creditable alternatives to the popular dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. This paper derives a new macroeconomic...

Bayesian inference requires an analyst to set priors. Setting the right prior is crucial for precise forecasts. This paper analyzes how optimal prior changes when an economy is hit by a recession. For this task, an autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model is chosen. The results show that a...

Extreme Value Theory is increasingly used in the modelling of financial time series. The non-normality of stock returns leads to the search for alternative distributions that allows skewness and leptokurtic behavior. One of the most used distributions is the Pareto Distribution because it allows...

(Re)insurance companies need to model their liabilities' portfolio to compute the risk-adjusted capital (RAC) needed to support their business. The RAC depends on both the distribution and the dependence functions that are applied among the risks in a portfolio. We investigate the impact of...

This paper proposes a new method for approximating vector autoregressions by a finite-state Markov chain. The method is more robust to the number of discrete values and tends to outperform the existing methods over a wide range of the parameter space, especially for highly persistent vector...

The broader goal of this paper is to provide social researchers with some analytical guidelines when investigating structural equation models (SEM) with predominantly a formative specification. This research is the first to investigate the robustness and precision of parameter estimates of a...

Extreme Value Theory is increasingly used in the modelling of financial time series. The non-normality of stock returns leads to the search for alternative distributions that allows skewness and leptokurtic behavior. One of the most used distributions is the Pareto Distribution because it allows...

The origin of entropy dates back to 19th century. In 1948, the entropy concept as a measure of uncertainty was developed by Shannon. A decade after in 1957, Jaynes formulated Shannon’s entropy as a method for estimation and inference particularly for ill-posed problems by proposing the so...

The Hessian of the multivariate normal mixture model is derived, and estimators of the information matrix are obtained, thus enabling consistent estimation of all parameters and their precisions. The usefulness of the new theory is illustrated with two examples and some simulation experiments....

The purpose of the System Dynamics method is to study the relationship between structure and behavior in non-linear, dynamic systems. In such systems, the significance of various structural components to the behavior pattern exhibited, changes as the behavior unfolds. Changes in structural...