Mark Fisher
Working Paper 2015-15
December 2015
Download the full text of this paper (521 KB) 
This note presents a nonparametric Bayesian approach to fitting a distribution to the survey data provided in Kilian and Zha (2002) regarding the prior for the half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). A point mass at infinity is included. The unknown density is represented as an average of shape-restricted Bernstein polynomials, each of which has been skewed according to a preliminary parametric fit. A sparsity prior is adopted for regularization.
JEL classification: C11, C14, F31
Key words: nonparametric Bayesian estimation, Bernstein polynomials, simplex regression, importance sampling, PPP half-life deviations