The paper derives a parsimonious two-component affine diffusion model for a world stock index to capture the dynamics of aggregate wealth. The observable state variables of the model are the normalized index and the inverse of the stochastic market activity, both modeled as square root...

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, but replace the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student's t-distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that 1) the...

We introduce a new efficient importance sampler for nonlinear non-Gaussian state space models. We propose a general and efficient likelihood evaluation method for this class of models via the combination of numerical and Monte Carlo integration methods. Our methodology explores the idea that...