The objective of the paper is that of constructing finite Gaussian mixture approximations to analytically intractable density kernels. The proposed method is adaptive in that terms are added one at the time and the mixture is fully re-optimized at each step using a distance measure that...

The proposed 2008 TARP auction was intended to facilitate rapid purchases by the U.S. department of Treasury of a wide array of mortgage-backed securities in order to remove these “toxic assets” from the portfolios of financially stressed banks. The Treasury had selected a Reference Price...

The first chapter of my thesis (co-authored with David N. DeJong, Jean-Francois Richard and Roman Liesenfeld) develops a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation and filtering in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. These tasks...

This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines the extent to which real-world agents are rational in making quantitative expectations, an issue over which there is much debate. In this chapter dynamic models for new plant-level survey data are estimated in...

Limited dependent variable (LDV) panel data models pose substantial challenges in maximum likelihood estimation. The likelihood function in such models typically contains multivariate integrals that are often analytically intractable. To overcome such problem in a panel probit model with...

First chapter of my dissertation uses an EGARCH method and a Stochastic Volatility (SV) method which relies upon Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework based on Efficient Importance Sampling (EIS) to model inflation volatility of Turkey. The strength of SV model lies in its success in...

In the economic literature there are divergences on a number ofissues between the results obtained with macro- and micro-basedmodels. Habit formation in consumption is one example of suchdisagreement. Another example is the discrepancy between thetheoretical prediction that all investors should...

Models of dynastic households have been traditionally used to analyze persistence in earnings and wealth across generations, more recently to study patterns of wealth and fertility, transfers to children and education choices. However most of those models have looked at the theoretical outcomes...

In this dissertation, I develop empirical methods, built on the recent advances in industrial organization, to study charitable giving and fundraising in the charity market. In the first essay, we propose a multiple discrete choice model with differentiated charitable products and estimate the...