One of the most critical issues when using neural networks is how to select appropriate network architectures for the problem at hand. Practitioners usually refer to information criteria which might lead to over-parameterized models with heavy consequence on overfitting and poor ex-post forecast...

There is no shortage of opinions and discussion about recent productivity growth trends. In contrast, relatively little attention is paid to the degree of uncertainty surrounding recent estimates of such growth trends. This paper makes two contributions to the scant body of research that...

The main problem in the combination of volatility forecasts is that the volatility cannot be directly observed and hence loss functions such as the MSFE cannot be directly used unless a suitable proxy of the conditional variance is defined. A common approach is to use the squared returns but...

We calibrate a life-cycle model with uninsurable labor income risk and borrowing constraints to match wealth accumulation and portfolio allocation profiles of direct and indirect stockholders in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts. Tax-deferred accounts generate an increase in wealth...

This paper presents an open economy DSGE model, which is estimated on a euro area data set using Bayesian techniques. It extents current models by allowing for a detailed empirical analysis of fiscal stabilisation policies. Reaction functions for expenditure categories are estimated in order to...

We reconsider the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in the context of a new-keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. We assume that a fraction of the agents are non Ricardian and estimate the model parameters using Bayesian techniques. Our results show that the estimates of...

This paper considers the problem of pricing American options when the dynamics of the underlying are driven both by stochastic volatility following a square root process as used by Heston (1993) and by a Poisson jump process as introduced by Merton (1976). The two-factor homogeneous...

Since trading cannot take place continuously, the optimal portfolio calculated in a continuous-time model cannot be held, but the investor has to implement the continuous-time strategy in discrete time. This leads to the question how severe the resulting discretization error is. We analyze this...

The assessment of models of financial market behaviour requires evaluation tools. When complexity hinders a direct estimation approach, e.g., for agent based microsimulation models or multifractal models, simulation based estimators might provide an alternative. In order to apply such...

This paper uses an unobserved component model to examine the relative importance of the structural and the persistence approach to unemployment. We derive the NAIRU from a standard imperfect competition model. The price- and wage-setting schedules include a measure for unemployment persistence....