Models with random effects/latent variables are widely used for capturing unobserved heterogeneity in multilevel/hierarchical data and account for associations in multivariate data. The estimation of those models becomes cumbersome as the number of latent variables increases due to...

This paper investigates formation of expected longevity in an elderly popu- lation. We use Italian data from the early (2004) release of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The SHARE provides a numerical measure for subjective survival probability (SSP). To assess...

This paper develops a finite mixture distribution analysis of Beauty- Contest data obtained from diverse groups of experiments. ML estimation using the EM approach provides estimates for the means and variances of the component distributions, which are common to all the groups, and estimates of...

Combination of forecasts from survey data is complicated by the frequent entry and exit of individual forecasters which renders conventional least squares regression approaches infeasible. We explore the consequences of this issue for existing combination methods and propose new methods for...