A new time series model is proposed to describe observed asymmetries in postwar unemployment data. We assume that recession periods, when unemployment increases rapidly, are caused by unobserved positive shocks. The generating mechanism of these latent shocks is a censored regression model,...

Diffuse priors lead to pathological posterior behaviour 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, and a posteriori favour...

Adaptive Polar Sampling (APS) is proposed as a Markov chain Monte Carlo method for Bayesian analysis of models with ill-behaved posterior distributions. In order to sample efficiency from such a distribution, location-scale transformation and a transformation to polar coordinates are used.

In this paper, we make use of state space models to investigate the presence of stochastic trends in economic time series. A model is specified where such a trend can enter either in the autoregressive representation or in a separate state equation. Tests based on the former are analogous to...