The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis in order to analyze to what degree violations of the strong validity assumption affect the...

We propose a new methodology for designing flexible proposal densities for the joint posterior density of parameters and states in a nonlinear non-Gaussian state space model. We show that a highly efficient Bayesian procedure emerges when these proposal densities are used in an independent...

We analyze the impact of the estimation frequency - updating parameter estimates on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis - for commonly used GARCH models in a large-scale study, using more than twelve years (2000-2012) of daily returns for constituents of the S&P 500 index. We assess the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'International Small Business Journal' (2013). Volume 31, issue 1, pages 23-33.<P> Education is argued to be an important driver of the decision to start a business. The measurement of its influence, however, is difficult since it is considered...</p>

See also 'Are Education and Entrepreneurial Income Endogenous?' in <I>Entrepreneurship Research Journal</I> (2012), 2(3), 1-27.<P> Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and...</p></i>

This discussion paper was published in the <I> Economics of Education Review</I> (2012). Vol. 31(5), 515-523.<P> The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and...</p></i>

Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and occupational choice are mentioned as driving both the level of (entrepreneurial) income and of education. Using instrumental...

In several scientific fields, like bioinformatics, financial and macro-economics, important theoretical and practical issues exist that involve multimodal data distributions. We propose a Bayesian approach using mixtures distributions to approximate accurately such data distributions. Shape and...

A Bayesian dynamic compositional model is introduced that can deal with combining a large set of predictive densities. It extends the mixture of experts and the smoothly mixing regression models by allowing for combination weight dependence across models and time. A compositional model with...