Posterior Inference on Parameters in a Nonlinear DSGE Model via Gaussian-Based Filters

Abstract

This paper studies Gaussian-based filters within the pseudo-marginal Metropolis Hastings (PM-MH) algorithm for posterior inference on parameters in nonlinear DSGE models. We implement two Gaussian-based filters to evaluate the likelihood of a DSGE model solved to second and third order and embed them into the PM-MH: Central Difference Kalman filter (CDKF) and Gaussian mixture filter (GMF). The GMF is adaptively refined by splitting a mixture component into new mixture components based on Binomial Gaussian mixture. The overall results indicate that the estimation accuracy of the CDKF and the GMF is comparable to that of the particle filter (PF), except that the CDKF generates biased estimates in the extremely nonlinear case. The proposed GMF generates the most accurate estimates among them. We argue that the GMF with PM-MH can converge to the true and invariant distribution when the likelihood constructed by infinite Gaussian mixtures weakly converges to the true likelihood. In addition, we show that the Gaussian-based filters are more efficient than the PF in terms of effective computing time. Finally, we apply the method to real data.