To match the NBER business cycle features it is necessary to employ Generalised Dynamic Categorical (GDC) models that impose certain phase restrictions and permit multiple indexes. Theory suggests additional shape restrictions in the form of monotonicity and boundedness of certain transition...

Testing the validity of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts, or backtesting, is an integral part of modern market risk management and regulation. This is often done by applying independence and coverage tests developed in Christoffersen (1998) to so-called hit-sequences derived from VaR forecasts and...

The inference for hidden Markov chain models in which the structure is a multiple-equation macroeconomic model raises a number of difficulties that are not as likely to appear in smaller models. One is likely to want to allow for many states in the Markov chain without allowing the number of...

This paper develops a systematic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework based upon Efficient Importance Sampling (EIS) which can be used for the analysis of a wide range of econometric models involving integrals without an analytical solution. EIS is a simple, generic and yet accurate...

Recent work by Hamilton, Waggoner and Zha (2004) has demonstrated the importance of identification and normalization in econometric models. In this paper, we use the popular class of two-state Markov switching models to illustrate the consequences of alternative identification schemes for...