Likelihoods and posteriors of instrumental variable regression models with strong endogeneity and/or weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This may seriously affect inference based on Bayesian credible sets. When approximating such contours using...

In this paper we discuss several aspects of simulation based Bayesian econometric inference. We start at an elementary level on basic concepts of Bayesian analysis; evaluating integrals by simulation methods is a crucial ingredient in Bayesian inference. Next, the most popular and well-known...

Highly non-elliptical posterior distributions may occur in several econometric models, in particular, when the likelihood information is allowed to dominate and data information is weak. We explain the issue of highly non-elliptical posteriors in a model for the effect of education on income...

Bayesian Acceptance Sampling Approach is associated with utilization of prior process history for the selection of Distributions (viz., Gamma Poisson, Beta Binomial) to describe the random fluctuations involved in Acceptance Sampling. Calvin (1984) provides procedures and tables for implementing...

ANN (Artificial Neural Network) models and Spline techniques have been applied to economic analysis, to handle economic problems, evaluate portfolio risk and stock performance, and to forecast stock exchange rates and gold prices. These techniques are improving nowadays and continue to serve as...

It is usually considered that the proportion of handicapped people grows with age. Namely, the older the man/woman is, the more level of disability he/she suffers. However, empirical evidence shows that this assessment is not always true, or at least, it is not true in the Spanish population....

Hierarchical relationships between risk factors are seldom taken into account in epidemiological studies though some authors stressed the importance of doing so, and proposed a conceptual framework in which each level of the hierarchy is modeled separately. The objective of this paper was to...

Past literature investigating the determinants of tourist expenditure have made a wide use of econometric models to assess conditional relationships of a set of regressors in predicting individual spending. However such techniques provide little or no information about the relationships within...

This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, the support vector machine, and a non-parametric technique for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We give an introduction to underlying statistical models and represent the results of...

This paper discusses a tool for optimization of econometric models based on genetic algorithms. First, we briefly describe the concept of this optimization technique. Then, we explain the design of a specifically developed algorithm and apply it to a difficult econometric problem, the...