Empirical questions such as whether the Phillips curve or the Okun’s law is stable can often be framed as a model comparison—e.g., comparing a vector autoregression (VAR) in which the coefficients in one equation are constant versus one that has time-varying parameters. We develop Bayesian...

It is well known that different specification choices can give starkly different output gap estimates. To account for model uncertainty, we average estimates over a wide variety of popular specifications using stochastic model specification search. In particular, we consider three types of...

Adding multivariate stochastic volatility of a flexible form to large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving over a hundred variables has proved challenging due to computational considerations and over-parameterization concerns. The existing literature either works with homoskedastic models or...

Bayesian vector autoregressions are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting and structural analysis. Until recently, however, most empirical work had considered only small systems with a few variables due to parameter proliferation concern and computational limitations. We first review a...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. In particular, a popular metric for comparing stochastic volatility models is the DIC based on the conditional likelihood — obtained by conditioning on the latent variables. However, some recent...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. However, recent studies have cautioned against the use of the DIC for comparing latent variable models. In particular, the DIC calculated using the conditional likelihood (obtained by conditioning on the...