Importance sampling is used in many areas of modern econometrics to approximate unsolvable integrals. Its reliable use requires the sampler to possess a variance, for this guarantees a square root speed of convergence and asymptotic normality of the estimator of the integral. However, this...

In this paper we introduce a decomposition of the joint distribution of price changes of assets recorded trade--by--trade. Our decomposition means that we can model the dynamics of price changes using quite simple and interpretable models which are easily extended in a great number of...

In this paper we obtain a closed form expression for the convergence rate of the Gibbs sampler applied to an AR(1) plus noise model in terms of the parameters of the model. We also provide evidence that a ``centered'' parameterisation of a state space model is preferable for the performance of...

In this article we introduce a decomposition of the joint distribution of price changes of assets recorded trade-by-trade. Our decomposition means that we can model the dynamics of price changes using quite simple and interpretable models which are easily extended in a great number of...

This paper discusses and documents the algorithms of SsfPack 2.2. SsfPack is a suite of C routines for carrying out computations involving the statistical analysis of univariate and multivariate models in state space form. The emphasis is on documenting the link we have made to the Ox computing...

Although considerable attention has recently been paid to the behavior of the maximum likelihood estimator of simple moving average models, little progress has been made in finding a good approximation to its distribution in cases where the process is close to being noninvertible. In this paper...

In this paper we propose a simple time series model of the number of transactions made in intervals of length $\Delta $ seconds. We call this model the {\sf BIN} model. The properties of the {\sf BIN} model are evaluated while we explore connections between this model and Cox processes --- that...

Kim, Shephard, and Chib (1998) provided a Bayesian analysis of stochastic volatility models based on a fast and reliable Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Their method rules out the leverage effect, which is known to be important in applications. Despite this, their basic method has...

In this paper we introduce a decomposition of the joint distribution of price changes of assets recorded trade-by-trade. Our decomposition means that we can model the dynamics of price changes using quite simple and interpretable models which are easily extended in a great number of directions,...