This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

In this paper we carry over the concept of reverse probabilistic representations developed in Milstein, Schoenmakers, Spokoiny (2004) for diffusion processes, to discrete time Markov chains. We outline the construction of reverse chains in several situations and apply this to processes which are...

This paper addresses the question of macroeconomic integration in the Asian Pacific region. Economically, the analysis is based on the notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle coherence. The econometric procedure consists of tests for cointegration, the examination of vector...

Here we develop an approach for efficient pricing discrete-time American and Bermudan options which employs the fact that such options are equivalent to theEuropean ones with a consumption, combined with analysis of the market model over a small number of steps ahead. This approach allows...

In this paper we propose a jump-diffusion Libor model with jumps in ahigh-dimensional space (R^m) and test a stable non-parametric calibrationalgorithm which takes into account a given local covariance structure.The algorithm returns smooth and simply structured Lévy densities, andpenalizes the...

This paper presents a new method for spatially adaptive local likelihood estimation which applies to a broad class of nonparametric models, including the Gaussian, Poisson and binary response models. The main idea of the method is given a sequence of local likelihood estimates ("weak"...

The calibration of financial models has become rather important topic in recent years mainly because of the need to price increasingly complex options in a consistent way. The choice of the underlying model is crucial for the good performance of any calibration procedure. Recent empirical...

We investigate the problem of calibrating an exponential Lévy model based on market prices of vanilla options. We show that this inverse problem is in general severely ill-posed and we derive exact minimax rates of convergence. The estimation procedure we propose is based on the explicit...

The paper develops a non-parametric, non-stationary framework for business-cycle dating based on an innovative statistical methodology known as Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS). The methodology is used both for the study of the individual macroeconomic time series relevant to the dating of the...

Linear Methods are often used to compute approximate solutions to dynamic models, as these models often cannot be solved analytically. Linear methods are very popular, as they can easily be implemented. Also, they provide a useful starting point for understanding more elaborate numerical...