We provide an extensive evaluation of the predictive performance of the US yield curve for US gross domestic product growth by using new tests for forecast breakdown, in addition to a variety of in-sample and out-of-sample evaluation procedures. Empirical research over the past decades has...

We consider how unit-root and stationarity tests can be used to study the convergence of prices and rates of inflation. We show how the joint use of these tests in levels and first differences allows the researcher to distinguish between series that are converging and series that have already...

This paper documents that region-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged region-level income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and West Germany. However, "region-specific" consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region-specific income. Moreover, excess...

In this paper, we test the uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP), allowing for transitory deviations from it. These deviations may arise from variations in risk premia, errors in expectations and linearization errors, and are modelled as a zero-mean noise around the restrictions implied by the...

The inverse normal method, which is used to combine "P"-values from a series of statistical tests, requires independence of single test statistics in order to obtain asymptotic normality of the joint test statistic. The paper discusses the modification by <link rid="b10">Hartung (1999, "Biometrical Journal",...

The standard binary choice model in econometrics has the choice determined by a latent index crossing a threshold. The latent index is almost always assumed to be additively separable in observable and unobservable regressors, and most commonly linear in all regressors. This note provides a...

During the second half of the 1990s the US economy was characterized as the Goldilocks economy: not too hot, nor too cold, but just right. It was argued that this represented a new paradigm, enabling unemployment to remain low without igniting inflationary pressure. We examine the evidence for a...

We observe that care must be taken when using a regression-based approach to construct a standard error for the Gini coefficient. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper deals with the finite-sample performance of a set of unit-root tests for cross-correlated panels. Most of the available macroeconomic time series cover short time periods. The lack of information, in terms of time observations, implies that univariate tests are not powerful enough to...

In this paper, we introduce threshold-type nonlinearities within a single-equation cointegrating regression model and propose a testing procedure for testing the null hypothesis of linear cointegration vs. cointegration with threshold effects. Our framework allows the modelling of long-run...