I find it undesirable that Dynare now by default uses a second order approximation with particle filtering.

dynare_estimation_1 used to set order=1 by default. With the particle filter that is no longer the case. Estimation of legacy mod-files now always crashes with the error that

Error using dynare_estimation_1 (line 43)

For estimating the model with a second order approximation using a non linear filter, one should have options_.particle.status=1;

if order=1 is not explicitly specified in the estimation command. The reason is that Dynare by default initializes order=2. Hence, many legacy mod-files will crash. I would suggest we either set the baseline order in dynare_estimation_1 to 1 as before unless order is set explicitly to 2 in estimation (or options_.particle.status=1 is defined) or we have to make the error message more explicit.

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Johannes Pfeifer

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72076 Tübingen

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jpfeifer@gmx.de