Smet and Wolter DSGE for EU

Dynare help (legacy posts)
4

  1. In theory it does not matter, but in practice it does. The further you start away from the posterior mode, the harder will it be to achieve convergence. However, if you don’t have any information, the prior mean/mode is by definition your best guess for the starting value.

  2. If mh_replic>2000 Dynare will display convergence diagnostics (either Brooks/Gelman or Geweke, depending on mh_nblocks)

Regarding prior/posterior comparison, you are mistaken. See [Prior distribution problem)