International trade data are filled with discrepancies–where two countries report different values of trade with each other. I develop a novel trade data quality index for reconciling the discrepancies in bilateral trade data. I calculate the quality for each country’s imports and exports...

We study optimality properties in finite samples for time-varying volatility models driven by the score of the predictive likelihood function. Available optimality results for this class of models suffer from two drawbacks. First, they are only asymptotically valid when evaluated at the...

Nonlinear, non-Gaussian state space models have found wide applications in many areas. Since such models usually do not allow for an analytical representation of their likelihood function, sequential Monte Carlo or particle filter methods are mostly applied to estimate their parameters. Since...

This paper presents the nonlinear regression analysis between the transformer's measurable parameters (temperature of oil and winding) and the electrical parameters (hydropower plant's aggregate). There is not a specific mathematical function that connects the winding and oil temperature with...

We employ real-time data available to the US monetary policy makers to estimate a Taylor rule augmented with a measure of financial uncertainty over the period 1969-2008. We find evidence in favor of a systematic response to financial uncertainty over and above that to expected inflation, output...

There are many economic parameters that depend on nonparametric first steps. Examples include games, dynamic discrete choice, average consumer surplus, and treatment effects. Often estimators of these parameters are asymptotically equivalent to a sample average of an object referred to as the...

New nonparametric methods that identify and estimate counterfactuals for individuals, when each is characterized by a vector of unobserved characteristics, are developed and applied to estimate systems of individual consumer demand and welfare measures. The unobserved characteristics are allowed...

The estimation of the holding periods of financial products has to be done in a dynamic process in which the size of the observation time interval influences the result. Small intervals will produce smaller average holding periods than bigger ones. The approach developed in this paper offers the...

This article uses the Case-Shiller technique for constructing housing price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991-2002 consisting of 10 376 pairs of repeated sales. Using a weighted least squares scheme in order to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a...