We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...

In this paper we propose a novel methodology to analyze optimal policies under model uncertainty in micro-founded macroeconomic models. As an application we assess the relevant sources of uncertainty for the optimal conduct of monetary policy within (parameter uncertainty) and across models...

In this paper, the following question is posed: Can the New Keynesian Open Economy Model by Galí and Monacelli 2005b) explain "Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics", as documented in Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000b)? The model features a small open economy with complete markets, Calvo...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...

We consider two semiparametric models for the weight function in a bias sample model. The object of our interest parametrizes the weight function, and it is either Euclidean or non Euclidean. One of the models discussed in this paper is motivated by the estimation the mixing distribution of...

Along with many others, we agree that a modern education in statistics needs to incorporate the practical analysis of real datasets, which are usually more complex than the common examples found in standard textbooks. The software used in the teaching of statistics includes standard spreadsheet...

Normal distribution of the residuals is the traditional assumption in the classical multivariate time series models. Nevertheless it is not very often consistent with the real data. Copulae allows for an extension of the classical time series models to nonelliptically distributed residuals. In...

We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables with the example of age-specific mortality in the U.S., building on the Lee-Carter approach and extending it in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables underlying...