In order to identify structural shocks that affect economic variables, restrictions need to be imposed on the parameters of structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models. Economic theory is the primary source of such restrictions. However, only over-identifying restrictions can be tested with...

Implicit in the drug-approval process is a host of decisions---target patient population, control group, primary endpoint, sample size, follow-up period, etc.---all of which determine the trade-off between Type I and Type II error. We explore the application of Bayesian decision analysis (BDA)...

Bayesian empirical approaches appear frequently in fields such as engineering, computer science, political science and medicine, but almost never in law. This article illustrates how such approaches might be very useful in empirical legal studies. In particular, Bayesian approaches enable a much...

In this article we introduce a new framework for counterparty risk model backtesting based on Bayesian methods. This provides a conceptually sound approach for analyzing model performance which is also straightforward to implement. We show that our methodology provides important advantages over...

This paper studies large sample classical and Bayesian inference in a prototypical linear DSGE model and demonstrates that inference on the structural parameters based on a Gaussian likelihood is unaffected by departures from Gaussianity of the structural shocks. This surprising result is due to...

We consider structural vector autoregressions identified through stochastic volatility. Our focus is on whether a particular structural shock is identified by heteroskedasticity without the need to impose any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our exercise: (i) a set...

The degree of empirical support of a priori plausible structures on the cointegration vectors has a central role in the analysis of cointegration. Villani (2000) and Strachan and van Dijk (2003) have recently proposed finite sample Bayesian procedures to calculate the posterior probability of...

We present a comprehensive framework for Bayesian estimation of structural nonlinear dynamic economic models on sparse grids. The Smolyak operator underlying the sparse grids approach frees global approximation from the curse of dimensionality and we apply it to a Chebyshev approximation of the...

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...