Analysing Regime-Switching and Cointegration with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Abstract: The statistical analysis of cointegration is crucial for inferring shared stochastic trends between variables and is an important area of Econometrics for analyzing long-term equilibriums in the economy. Bayesian inference of cointegration involves the identification of cointegrating vectors that are determined up to arbitrary linear combinations, for which the Gibbs sampler is often used to simulate draws from the posterior distribution. However, economic theory may not suggest linear relations and regime-switching models can be used to account for non-linearity. Modeling cointegration and regime-switching as well as the combination of them are associated with highly parameterized models that can prove to be difficult for Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques such as the Gibbs sampler. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, which aims at efficiently exploring the posterior distribution, may thus facilitate these difficulties. Furthermore, posterior distributions with highly varying curvature in their geometries can be adequately monitored by Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. The aim of the thesis is to analyze how Hamiltonian Monte Carlo performs in simulating draws from the posterior distributions of models accounting for cointegration and regime-switching. The results suggest that while it is not necessarily the case that regime-switching will be identified, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo performs well in exploring the posterior distribution. However, high rates of divergences from the true Hamiltonian trajectory reduce the algorithm to a Random Walk to some extent, limiting the efficiency of the sampling.