The historical evolution of the corporate tax burden in the OECD nations is studied, beginning with an assessment of alternative measures of the burden. Descriptive analysis of these time series reveals no evidence of a competitive "race to the bottom" in capital taxation, and little evidence of...

We compare testing strategies for Granger noncausality in vector autoregressions (VARs)that may or may not have unit roots and cointegration. Sequential testing methods are examined; these test for cointegration and use either a differenced VAR or a vector error correction model(VECM), in which to...

Given a probability density f on R^d, the minimum volume set of probability content á can be estimated by the level set of the same probability content corresponding to a kernel estimator of f. We obtain convergence rates for this plug-in estimator with respect to a measure-based distance...

Since the seminal paper by Dickey and Fuller in 1979, unit-root tests have conditioned the standard approaches to analyse time series with strong serial dependence, the focus being placed in the detection of eventual unit roots in an autorregresive model fitted to the series. In this paper we...

This article proposes a test for the Martingale Difference Hypothesis (MDH) using dependence measures related to the characteristic function. The MDH typically has been tested using the sample autocorrelations or in the spectral domain using the periodogram. Tests based on these statistics are...

This article presents a comparison of four methods to compute the posterior probabilities of the possible orders in polynomial regression models. These posterior probabilities are used for forecasting by using Bayesian model averaging. It is shown that Bayesian model averaging provides a closer...

A major problem in statistical quality control is to detect a change in the underlying distribution of independent sequentially observed random vectors. The case where the prechange distribution is Gaussian has been extensively analyzed. We are concerned here with the less usual non-normal...

In this paper, unobserved component models with GARCH disturbances are extended to allow for asymmetric responses of conditional variances to positive and negative shocks. The asymmetric conditional variance is represented by a member of the QARCH class of models. The proposed model allows to...

A bayesian approach is used to estimate a nonparametric regression model. The main features of the procedure are, first, the functional form of the curve is approximated by a mixture of local polynomials by Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA); second, the model weights are approximated by the BIC...

Inequality and polarization analyses are complementary but conceptually different. They are usually implemented independently in practic e, with different a priori assumptions and different tools. In this paper, we develop a unique method to study simultaneously these different and complementary...