Previous euro area money demand studies have used aggregated national time series data from the countries participating in the European Monetary Union (EMU). However, aggregation may be problematic because macroeconomic convergence processes have taken place in the countries of interest....

Consumption-based equivalence scales are estimated by applying the extended partially linear model (EPLM) to the 1998 German Income and Consumption Survey (EVS). In this model the equivalence scales are identified from nonlinearities in household demand. The econometric framework should not...

Some recent specifications for GARCH error processes explicitly assume a conditional variance that is generated by a mixture of normal components, albeit with some parameter restrictions. This paper analyses the general normal mixture GARCH(1,1) model which can capture time variation in both...

<MONO>gnuplot</MONO>, under active development since 1986, is an interactive plotting utility for UNIX, IBM OS|2, MS Windows, DOS, Apple Macintosh, VMS, Atari and many other platforms. It is free and open source, though it is not licensed under the GPL, nor is it GNU software. <MONO>gnuplot</MONO> supports a number of...</mono></mono>

Nonlinear models of deviations from PPP have recently provided an important, theoretically well motivated, contribution to the PPP puzzle. Most of these studies use temporally aggregated data to empirically estimate the nonlinear models. As noted by Taylor (2001), if the true DGP is nonlinear,...

We study the dynamics of the cross-section distribution of patents per capita for the 48 continental US states from 1930 to 2000 using a discrete-state Markov chain. We test for and find evidence in favor of the (knowledge) convergence hypothesis. The distribution of patents is converging to a...

Although the asset data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is of very high quality, there is sufficient noise to frustrate attempts to study saving behaviour by examining wave-to-wave change in wealth. In this research, we attempt to reduce noise by means of reactive-dependent...

This paper shows that the quadratic shape of the Engel curve for alcohol is induced by preference heterogeneity between drinkers and abstainers in a Japanese data set. With controlling the heterogeneity, it is shown that the Engel curve for alcohol slopes monotonically downwards for drinkers,...

This paper examines price adjustment behaviour in the magazine industry. In a frequently cited study, Cecchetti (1986) constructs a reduced-form (S, s) model for firms. Cecchetti assumes that a firm's pricing rules are fixed for non-overlapping three-year intervals and estimates the model using...

Existing methods for constructing confidence bands for multivariate impulse response functions may have poor coverage at long lead times when variables are highly persistent. The goal of this paper is to propose a simple method that is not pointwise and that is robust to the presence of highly...