The aim of this paper is to test the claim that social protection is a luxury good. Therefore, GDP elasticity of selected social protection expenditure is estimated using a new econometric approach developed first by Kao and Chiang (Advances in Econometrics, 15, 179-222, 2000). Time series...

The usefulness of a predictor evaluation framework which combines a blocked cross-validation scheme with directional accuracy measures is investigated. The advantage of using a blocked cross-validation scheme with respect to the standard out-of-sample procedure is that cross-validation yields...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, we take a panel cointegration approach that allows for structural breaks to the analysis of the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads in nine economies of the European Monetary Union. We find evidence for a level break in the cointegrating...

This paper investigates the relationship between government spending and private consumption. The general framework is a cointegration approach of Ogaki (1992) used to estimate the intratemporal elasticity of substitution between government and private consumption in a panel of 15 European...

This paper aims to provide a nonparametric analysis of the integrated processes of an integer order, via a theoretical solution of a generalized eigenvalue problem. To this end, we introduce a mean operator for the process, by using weights belonging to a Sobolev Space.