This paper investigates the possibility of constructing a composite leading indicator of Australian inflation. Five variables are considered and found to have both short-run and long-run causal linkages with consumer prices. A composite leading indicator is constructed on the basis of the...

This paper explores the extent to which accounting for structural breaks in ERM exchange rates affects inferences on the presence of a unit root in these exchange rates. Four ERM exchange rates, found by previous empirical studies to be nonstationary, are examined. In contrast to previous...

This paper demonstrates, for a two-good, two-country model with finitely-lived agents, the possibility of using national debt as a policy instrument to improve welfare via an improvement in the terms of trade. The latter is large enough to outweigh the negative effect of crowding out of capital...

This note considers the value of surface response equations which can be used to calculate critical values for a range of unit root and cointegration tests popular in applied economic research.

One of the controversial issues in the stockmarket overreaction literature is the claim that price reversals for losers are more pronounced than for winners. We present new results for the UK which suggest that the opposite conclusion is true. Our results are particularly interesting because...

This paper implements a variety of robust, regression-based diagnostics to nonlinear models of effective federal individual income tax. Estimates of effective marginal tax rates obtained from these tax models are frequently used in the empirical growth and real business cycle literature to...

The principal objective of the experiment reported on in this paper was to ascertain what measures of uncertainty the subjects deemed to be relevant in situations of ambiguity regarding outcomes. This permitted an assessment of non-additivity of probabilities and subjects' choices were then...

Using semi-annual data, this study empirically finds that, over the 1965-91 period, the rate of return on thrift (S&L) assets is an increasing function of the S&L mortgage rate, the tangible capital/asset ratio, and energy prices, whereas it is a decreasing function of the cost of deposits and...

This paper discusses McCombie's (1987) empirical evidence on the Simon-Shaikh critique. It is argued that while the theoretical argument is correct, the evidence presented depends on the adjustment of the stock of capital for capacity utilization. Probably factor shares are not sufficiently...

This paper studies the degree of convergence in per capita social protection benefits registered in the European Union during the 1966-92 period. To that end, we use data supplied by Eurostat and compute the two indicators more widely used in convergence analysis: σ-convergence and β-convergence.