Smooth mixtures, i.e. mixture models with covariate-dependent mixing weights, are very useful flexible models for conditional densities. Previous work shows that using too simple mixture components for modeling heteroscedastic and/or heavy tailed data can give a poor fit, even with a large...

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling literature to estimate the log-likelihood accurately using...

A neglected aspect of the otherwise fairly well developed Bayesian analysis of cointegration is the point estimation of the cointegration space. It is pointed out here that, due to the well known non-identification of the cointegration vectors, the parameter space is not an inner product space...

The degree of empirical support of a priori plausible structures on the cointegration vectors has a central role in the analysis of cointegration. Villani (2000) and Strachan and van Dijk (2003) have recently proposed finite sample Bayesian procedures to calculate the posterior probability of...

We introduce a Bayesian approach to model assessment in the class of graphical vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. Due to the very large number of model structures that may be considered, simulation based inference, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, is not feasible. Therefore, we derive an...

The multivariate split nomal distribution extends the usual multivariate normal distribution by a set of parameters which allows for skewness in the form of contraction/dilation along a subset of the prinicpal axis. The paper derives some properties for this distribution, including its moment...

Vector autoregressions have steadily gained in popularity since their introduction in econometrics 25 years ago. A drawback of the otherwise fairly well developed methodology is the inability to incorporate prior beliefs regarding the system's steady state in a satisfactory way. Such prior...

We show how to speed up Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for Bayesian inference in large data problems by data subsampling. SMC sequentially updates a cloud of particles through a sequence of distributions, beginning with a distribution that is easy to sample from such as the prior and ending with...

In this paper, we study identification and misspecification problems in standard closed and open-economy empirical New-Keynesian DSGE models used in monetary policy analysis. We find that problems with model misspecification still appear to be a first-order issue in monetary DSGE models, and...