The first chapter of my thesis (co-authored with David N. DeJong, Jean-Francois Richard and Roman Liesenfeld) develops a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation and filtering in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. These tasks...

Term structure models have attracted tremendous amount of attention in the last two decades. My first paper specifies the dynamic and cross-sectional behavior of bonds in the framework of the Linear or general affine term structure model (ATSM). After revisiting the basic theory of ATSM under...

This thesis deals with macroeconomic dynamics. In chapter 1, I study a one-sector growth model withendogenous discount rate of the sort proposed by citet{1}. I extendthe model into a heterogeneous agents model with respect to initialwealth, and investigate whether the wealthdistribution may...

This thesis is organized in three chapters. In the first two chapters, an econometric model selection procedure and a method to improve some existing estimators are proposed. In the third chapter, a theoretical microeconomic analysis of herd behavior is performed under a fairly new set of...

Adaptive learning is important in dynamic models since it is a process that shows the improvement in the understanding of the agents of the model. Whenever there is a dynamic environment, there is a room for improvement through learning. In this thesis I analyze the adaptive learning of the...

In the economic literature there are divergences on a number ofissues between the results obtained with macro- and micro-basedmodels. Habit formation in consumption is one example of suchdisagreement. Another example is the discrepancy between thetheoretical prediction that all investors should...

I study selected fiscal policy issues both in the short-run and long-run using empirical methods. In Chapter 2, I investigate the effects of increases in U.S. government expenditures on the private sector in a real business cycle framework using maximum likelihood. I distinguish between the...

This paper studies dynamical and cross-sectional structures of bonds, typically used as riskfreeassets in mathematical finance. After reviewing a mathematical theory on commonfactors, also known as principal components, we compute empirical common factors for 10US government bonds (3month,...