Recent work by Hamilton, Waggoner and Zha (2002) has demonstrated the importance of identification and nomalization in econometric models. In this paper, we use the popular class of two-state Markov switching models to illustrate the consequences of alternative identification schemes for empirical analysis of business cycles. A defining feature of (classical) recessions is that economic activit...

This volume derives from Chao's 2002 University of Amsterdam doctoral thesis. Chao contrasts the received and the semantic views of theory in economics and comes down clearly in favour of the latter. He illustrates his arguments with discussion of demand theory, the consumption function, and the so-called LSE approach to econometrics. The account is commendably (perhaps overly) concise and is g...

Keywords: Jet aircraft Fuel price Operating cost Leontief technology Translog a b s t r a c t Investigation of the airline response to a fuel price increase is in effect an investigation of the role of variable interactions in aircraft cost models. We examine the impact of fuel price on aircraft costs and airline operational strategies by developing two classes of operating cost models for jet ...

Businesses routinely rely on econometric models to analyze and predict consumer behavior. Estimation of such models may require combining a firm’s internal data with external datasets to take into account sample selection, missing observations, omitted variables and errors in measurement within the existing data source. In this paper we point out that these data problems can be addressed when e...

This paper surveys the fundamental principles of subjective Bayesian inference in econometrics and the implementation of those principles using posterior simulation methods. The emphasis is on the combination of models and the development of predictive distributions. Moving beyond conditioning on a fixed number of completely specified models, the paper introduces subjective Bayesian tools for f...