This paper presents an application of a recently developed approach by Matteson and James (2012) for the analysis of change points in a data set, namely major financial market indices converted to financial return series. The general problem concerns the inference of a change in the distribution...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Siam Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (2011). Volume 32, issue 3, pages 665-684.<P> A sequence of real numbers (<I>x_n</I>) is Benford if the significands, i.e. the fractionparts in the floating-point representation of (<I>x_n</I>), are distributed...</i></i></p></i>

We provide estimates of the rebound effect for car transport in Denmark, using a rich data set with individual household data on car use, fuel efficiency, and car as well as household characteristics. A demand model is estimated in first differences; the availability of households in the sample...

We model and measure simultaneous large losses of the market value of insurers to understand the impact of shocks on the insurance sector. The downside risk of insurers is explicitly modelled by common and idiosyncratic risk factors. Since reinsurance is important for the capacity of insurers,...

A sequence of real numbers (<I>x_n</I>) is Benford if the significands, i.e. the fraction

We model and measure simultaneous large losses of the market value of insurers to understand the impact of shocks on the insurance sector. The downside risk of insurers is explicitly modelled by common and idiosyncratic risk factors. Since reinsurance is important for the capacity of insurers,...

This paper features the application of a novel and recently developed method of statistical and mathematical analysis to the assessment of financial risk: namely Regular Vine copulas. Dependence modeling using copulas is a popular tool in financial applications, but is usually applied to pairs...

This paper features an application of Regular Vine copulas which are a novel and recently developed statistical and mathematical tool which can be applied in the assessment of composite financial risk. Copula-based dependence modelling is a popular tool in financial applications, but is usually...

We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...

Several lessons learned from a Bayesian analysis of basic economic time series models by means of the Gibbs sampling algorithm are presented. Models include the Cochrane-Orcutt model for serial correlation, the Koyck distributed lag model, the Unit Root model, the Instrumental Variables model...