Simple inflation targets may be supplemented with an escape clause to be evoked in case the economy is hit by a major supply shock. In this paper, consistent solutions to the Flood and Isard (1990) escape clause model are derived in the spirit of Lohmann (1990), She showed that Flood and Isard's...

This paper has been prepared for Handbook of Applied Economic Statistics, edited by David Giles and Aman Ullah. It considers a particular class of single-equation nonlinear multivariate models called smooth transition regression (STR) models. Inference in these models, including testing...

In this study, productivity growth, convergence, and structural change are examined for various samples of EU members. It is found that structural change has had a minor impact on aggregate labor productivity growth, and that there has been significant convergence in labor productivity at the...

The purpose of this paper is to include consumer satisfaction in the specification of productivity. We accomplish this by using Shephard’s preference indirect distance function to model technology subject to a utility target. The utility constraint allows us to include information on consumer...

Many oligopoly theories predict that there will be a positive correlation between market size and the equilibrium number of firms, and some also imply that competition is more intense in larger markets. We test these predictions with a sample of 535 driving schools in 249 markets. With an...

This paper examines spillover effects of the activities of multinational firms. Such effects are most likely to be found in host countries, where the operations of foreign multinationals may influence local firms in the MNCs own industry as well as firms in other industries. However, there is no...

Many high frequency economic or financial time series display two empirical characteristics: high kurtosis and positive autocorrelation in the centred and squared observations. The first- order autocorrelation is typically low, and the autocorrelation function decays slowly. These series are...

This paper uses a stochastic overlapping generations model to answer the following question: How does the way the government structure its debt affect the term structure of interest rates? The analysis shows that the critical factor in determining the impact of public debt management on the term...

This paper considers smooth transition regression models and their univariate counterparts, smooth transition autoregressive models. The model is defined and thereafter, linearity testing, statistical inference in smooth transition models, and areas of application are discussed. A bivariate...

We study the product turnover in an industry and, in particular, the survival of new products. The data set consists of monthly sales of all products sold in the Swedish beer market over the time period of 1989-1995. The death rates of newly introduced products are high - out of 199 products an...