The performance of Monte Carlo integration methods like importance sampling or Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures greatly depends on the choice of the importance or candidate density. Usually, such a density has to be "close" to the target density in order to yield numerically accurate results...

Exchange rates typically exhibit time-varying patterns in both means and variances. The histograms of such series indicate heavy tails. In this paper we construct models which enable a decision-maker to analyze the implications of such time series patterns for currency risk management. Our...

Diffuse priors lead to pathological posterior behavior when used in Bayesian analyses of Simultaneous Equation Models (SEMs). This results from the local nonidentification of certain parameters in SEMs. When this, a priori known, feature is not captured appropriately, an a posteriori favor for...

Adaptive Polar Sampling is proposed as an algorithm where random drawings are directly generated from the target function (posterior) in all-but-one directions of the parameter space. The method is based on the mixed integration technique of Van Dijk, Kloek & Boender (1985) but extends this one...

In Hoogerheide, Kaashoek and Van Dijk (2002) the class of neural network sampling methods is introduced to sample from a target (posterior) distribution that may be multi-modal or skew, or exhibit strong correlation among the parameters. In these methods the neural network is used as an...

The flexibility of neural networks to handle complex data patterns of economic variables is well known. In this survey we present a brief introduction to a neural network and focus on two aspects of its flexibility . First, a neural network is used to recover the dynamic properties of a...

A major problem in applying neural networks is specifying the size of the network. Even for moderately sized networks the number of parameters may become large compared to the number of data. In this paper network performance is examined while reducing the size of the network through the use of...

The effect which the oil price time series has on the long run properties of Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) models for price levels and import demand is investigated. As the oil price variable is assumed to be weakly exogenous for the long run parameters, a cointegration testing procedure allowing...

Using annual data on real Gross Domestic Product per capita of seventeen industrialized nations in the twentieth century the empirical relevance of shocks, trends and cycles is investigated. A class of neural network models is specified as an extension of the class of vector autoregressive...

A sensible Bayesian model selection or comparison strategy implies selecting the model with the highest posterior probability. While some improper priors have attractive properties such as, e.g., low frequentist risk, it is generally claimed that Bartlett's paradox implies that using improper...