This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

We introduce a non-Gaussian dynamic mixture model for macroeconomic forecasting. The Locally Adaptive Signal Extraction and Regression (LASER) model is designed to capture relatively persistent AR processes (signal) contaminated by high frequency noise. The distribution of the innovations in...

We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly non-linear relationships between firm failure and earnings, leverage, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive non-linearities yields...

Time series subject to parameter shifts of random magnitude and timing are commonly modeled with a change-point approach using Chib's (1998) algorithm to draw the break dates. We outline some advantages of an alternative approach in which breaks come through mixture distributions in state...

We model a regression density nonparametrically so that at each value of the covariates the density is a mixture of normals with the means, variances and mixture probabilities of the components changing smoothly as a function of the covariates. The model extends existing models in two important...