Time varying parameter (TVP) models have enjoyed an increasing popularity in empirical macroeconomics. However, TVP models are parameter-rich and risk over-fitting unless the dimension of the model is small. Motivated by this worry, this article proposes several Time Varying Dimension (TVD)...

We consider the problem of accurately measuring the credit risk of a portfolio consisting of loans, bonds and other financial assets. One particular performance measure of interest is the probability of large portfolio losses over a fixed time horizon. We revisit the so-called t-copula that...

We introduce a new class of models that has both stochastic volatility and moving average errors, where the conditional mean has a state space representation. Having a moving average component, however, means that the errors in the measurement equation are no longer serially independent, and...

Macroeconomic practitioners frequently work with multivariate time series models such as VARs, factor augmented VARs as well as timevarying parameter versions of these models (including variants with multivariate stochastic volatility). These models have a large number of parameters and, thus,...

Many studies have reported a relationship between urban air pollution levels and respiratory health problems. However, there are notable variations in results, depending on modeling approach, covariate selection, period of analysis, etc. To help clarify these factors we compare and apply two...

This article empirically analyzes the regional location decisions of the world's; major gold mining firms using a dataset of political, economic, regulatory, infrastructural and investment risk variables observed since 1975. The aim is to determine whether environmental stringency affects...

This paper is motivated by the recent interest in the use of Bayesian VARs for forecasting, even in cases where the number of dependent variables is large. In such cases factor methods have been traditionally used, but recent work using a particular prior suggests that Bayesian VAR methods can...

Block factor methods offer an attractive approach to forecasting with many predictors. These extract the information in these predictors into factors reflecting different blocks of variables (e.g. a price block, a housing block, a financial block, etc.). However, a forecasting model which simply...