The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
The paper is dedicated to a new approach to analyze changes of qualitative characteristic of economic process by means of a special kind of nonhomogeneous Markov chain basing on the concept of switching models. Qualitative feature of economic process (such as evaluation of economic situation) may be in natural way modeled by polynomial distribution. In the paper the authoress assumes that its distribution is a mixture of multinomial probability distributions with parameters dependent on transition probabilities of a Markov chain. Such approach let treat the data observed as an outcome of a nonhomogeneous Markov chain with transition matrix in each period belonging to a finite set of possible matrices. The choice of the matrix describing the process in each moment of observation is governed by an unobserved regime variable. In other words nonhomogeneity of a Markov chain consists in switches from one regime transition matrix to another. In the paper she develops maximum likelihood estimators of the model's parameters and presents the application of the model to analysis the responses from business tendency survey in Poland for the case of micro data (i.e. when the whole history of responses of each individual respondent is available) and macro data (only the structures of responses are available).