Human mortality has been improving faster than expected over the past few decades. This unprecedented improvement has caused significant financial stress to pension plan sponsors and annuity providers. The widely recognized Lee-Carter model often assumes linearity in its period effect as an...

This paper extends the family of smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) models by proposing a speci.cation in which the autoregressive parameters follow random walks. The random walks in the parameters capture permanent structural change within a regime switching framework, but in contrast to...

While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-run concept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economic belief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing time series models, i.e. the exponential...

In ESTAR models it is usually difficult to determine parameter estimates, as it can be observed in the literature. We show that the phenomena of getting strongly biased estimators is a consequence of the so-called identification problem, the problem of properly distinguishing the transition...