Do voters reward national leaders who are more competent economic managers, or merely those who happen to be in power when the world economy booms? Using data from 268 democratic elections held between 1978 and 1999, I compare the effect of world growth (luck) and national growth relative to...

This paper analyses the effects of social security reforms on saving in Britain. We use the British Household Panel Survey to investigate the interactions between voluntary additional contributions to personal pension plans (PPP) and saving in conventional forms. In particular, we test whether...

The generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator is often used to test for convergence in income distribution in a dynamic panel set-up. We argue that though consistent, the GMM estimator utilizes the sample observations inefficiently. We propose a simple ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator...

Are weekly inflation forecasts informative? Although several central banks review and discuss monetary policy issues on a bi-weekly basis, there have been no attempts by analysts to construct systematic estimates of core inflation that supports such a decision-making schedule. The timeliness of...

Benchmark revisions in non-stationary real-time data may adversely affect the results of regular revision analysis and the estimates of long-run economic relationships. Cointegration analysis can reveal the nature of vintage heterogeneity and guide the adjustment of real-time data for benchmark...

Recent studies by economists have focused on cultural transmission from the origin country rather than the origin family. Our paper extends this research by investigating how "family-specific"'cultural transmission' can affect fertility rates. Following Machado and Santos Silva ["Journal of the...

The short end of the US$ term structure of interest rates is analysed allowing for the possibility of fractional integration and cointegration. This approach permits mean-reverting dynamics for the data and the existence of a common long run stochastic trend to be maintained simultaneously. We...