We study the inflation uncertainty reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters 1969-2001. Three popular measures of uncertainty built from survey data are analyzed in the context of models for forecasting and asset pricing, and improved estimation methods are...

This paper focuses on the coordination problem among countries imposing controls on capital inflows. In a simple model of capital flows and controls, we show that inflow restrictions distort international capital flows to other countries and that, in turn, such capital flow deflection may lead...

We summarize some methods useful in formulating and solving Hansen-Sargent robust control problems, and suggest extensions to discretionary and simple rule policies. Matlab and Gauss software is provided. Applications to the term structure of interest rates and to the time inconsistency of...

This paper demonstrates that the class of conditionally linear and Gaussian state-space models offers a general and convenient framework for simultaneously handling nonlinearity, structural change and outliers in time series. Many popular nonlinear time series models, including threshold, smooth...

Andrieu et al. (2010) prove that Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers still converge to the correct posterior distribution of the model parameters when the likelihood estimated by the particle filter (with a finite number of particles) is used instead of the likelihood. A critical issue for...

Time series subject to parameter shifts of random magnitude and timing are commonly modeled with a change-point approach using Chib's (1998) algorithm to draw the break dates. We outline some advantages of an alternative approach in which breaks come through mixture distributions in state...

We model a regression density flexibly so that at each value of the covariates the density is a mixture of normals with the means, variances and mixture probabilities of the components changing smoothly as a function of the covariates. The model extends the existing models in two important ways....