The problem of forecasting from vector autoregressive models has attracted considerable attention in the literature. The most popular non-Bayesian approaches use large sample normal theory or the bootstrap to evaluate the uncertainty associated with the forecast. The literature has concentrated...

Given a fitted stochastic mortality model, we can express the uncertainty associated with future death rates in terms of confidence or prediction intervals. Recently, a group of researchers have proposed using fan charts to display prediction intervals for future mortality rates. Existing...

The recent financial crisis has seen huge swings in corporate bond spreads. It is analyzed what quality VAR-based forecasts would have had prior and during the crisis period. Given that forecasts of the mean of interest rates or financial market prices are subject to large uncertainty...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

Threshold Accepting (TA) is a powerful optimization heuristic from the class of stochastic local search algorithms. It has been applied successfully to different optimization problems in statistics and econometrics, including the uniform design problem. Using the latter application as example,...