Financial econometrics is a great success story in economics. Econometrics uses data and statistical inference methods, together with structural and descriptive modeling, to address rigorous economic problems. Its development within the world of finance is quite recent and has been paralleled by...

The recursive prediction and filtering formulas of the Kalman filter are difficult to implement in nonlinear state space models. For Gaussian linear state space models, or for models with qualitative state variables, the recursive formulas of the filter require the updating of a finite number of...