The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis in order to analyze to what degree violations of the strong validity assumption affect the...

The weighted-average least squares (WALS) approach, introduced by Magnus et al. (2010) in the context of Gaussian linear models, has been shown to enjoy important advantages over other strictly Bayesian and strictly frequentist model averaging estimators when accounting for problems of...

This paper presents the parallel computing implementation of the MitISEM algorithm, labeled Parallel MitISEM. The basic MitISEM algorithm, introduced by Hoogerheide, Opschoor and Van Dijk (2012), provides an automatic and flexible method to approximate a non-elliptical target density using...

Many statistical and econometric learning methods rely on Bayesian ideas, often applied or reinterpreted in a frequentist setting. Two leading examples are shrinkage estimators and model averaging estimators, such as weighted-average least squares (WALS). In many instances, the accuracy of these...

We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the WALS estimator, a model-averaging estimator with attractive finite-sample and computational properties. WALS is closely related to the normal location model, and hence much of the paper concerns the asymptotic behavior of the estimator of the unknown...

We introduce a Combined Density Nowcasting (CDN) approach to Dynamic Factor Models (DFM) that in a coherent way accounts for time-varying uncertainty of several model and data features in order to provide more accurate and complete density nowcasts. The combination weights are latent random...

Using a limiting approach to portfolio credit risk, we obtain analyticexpressions for the tail behavior of the distribution of credit losses. We showthat in many cases of practical interest the distribution of these losses haspolynomial ('fat') rather than exponential ('thin') tails. Our...

This paper presents the R-package <B>MitISEM</B> (mixture of <I>t</I> by importance sampling weighted expectation maximization) which provides an automatic and flexible two-stage method to approximate a non-elliptical target density kernel -- typically a posterior density kernel -- using an adaptive mixture...</i></b>

A Bayesian nonparametric predictive model is introduced to construct time-varying weighted combinations of a large set of predictive densities. A clustering mechanism allocates these densities into a smaller number of mutually exclusive subsets. Using properties of Aitchinson's geometry of the...

Social interactions are generally thought to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper we exploit detailed friendship nominations in the US Add Health data, and extend the Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR) model to deal with (i) endogenous peer selection, and...