In this paper we show that the exchange rates of some commodity exporter countries have the ability to predict the price of spot and future contracts of aluminum. This is shown with both in-sample and out-of-sample analyses. The theoretical underpinning of these results relies on the...

This paper extends the Bayesian semiparametric stochastic volatility (SV-DPM) model of Jensen and Maheu (2010). Instead of using a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) to model return innovations, we use an infinite hidden Markov model (IHMM). This allows for time variation in the return density...

The time-series dynamics of short-term interest rates are important as they are a key input into pricing models of the term structure of interest rates. In this paper we extend popular discrete time short-rate models to include Markov switching of infinite dimension. This is a Bayesian...

This paper investigates the economic importance of nonparametrically/semiparametrically modelling the shape and the change in the unknown distribution of returns in portfolio allocation problems from a Bayesian perspective. Besides parametric multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) benchmark models for...

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian time series model that combines the nonparametric features of an infinite hidden Markov model with the volatility persistence captured by the GARCH framework, to effectively model and forecast short-term interest rates. When applied to US 3-month Treasury...

We are interested in forecasting bankruptcies in a probabilistic way. Specifcally, we com- pare the classification performance of several statistical and machine-learning techniques, namely discriminant analysis (Altman's Z-score), logistic regression, least-squares support vector machines and...

The relationship between calorie and nutrient (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) intake as a function of income is explored using data for 171 countries over two time periods 1990-1992 and 2003-2005. Three types of analysis are employed: i) nonparametric, ii) panel regressions, and iii) quantile...

This paper proposes an infinite hidden Markov model (iHMM) to detect, date stamp,and estimate speculative bubbles. Three features make this new approach attractive to practitioners. First, the iHMM is capable of capturing the nonlinear dynamics of different types of bubble behaviors as it allows...

This paper addresses the estimation of the nonparametric conditional moment restricted model that involves an infinite-dimensional parameter g0. We estimate it in a quasi-Bayesian way, based on the limited information likelihood, and investigate the impact of three types of priors on the...

We propose Bayesian inference in hazard regression models where the baseline hazard is unknown, covariate effects are possibly age-varying (non-proportional), and there is multiplicative frailty with arbitrary distribution. Our framework incorporates a wide variety of order restrictions on...