In this paper, I study the drop of real GDP volatility which has been observed in the United States during the postwar period. This paper thoroughly estimates how much sectoral shifts contributed to this phenomenon called the Great Moderation. In a short section, Stock and Watson (2003) find...

In this dissertation we propose a new model which captures observed features of asset prices. The model reproduces the skewness and fat tails of asset returns by introducing a discretized variance gamma process as the driving innovation process, in addition to a double gamma process to reflect...

Suppose we wish to carry out likelihood based inference but we solely have an unbiased simulation based estimator of the likelihood.  We note that unbiasedness is enough when the estimated likelihood is used inside a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.  This result has recently been introduced in...

In this paper, I study the drop of real GDP volatility which has been observed in the United States during the postwar period. This paper thoroughly estimates how much sectoral shifts contributed to this phenomenon called the Great Moderation. In a short section, Stock and Watson (2003) find...

In this paper we apply Bayesian methods to estimate a stochastic volatility model using both the prices of the asset and the prices of options written on the asset. Implicit posterior densities for the parameters of the volatility model, for the latent volatilities and for the market price of...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochas- tic volatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on ap- proach which is easily implemented in empirical...

Using an unified framework, we integrate the two major Monte Carlo techniques currently available: Efficient Importance Sampling (EIS) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We do so for two reasons. First, the two methods complement one another. Loosely, EIS is effective for integrating...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from the housing sector onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from stock prices onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...