Healthcare expenditure has increased substantially in all western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the Analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...

A number of unit root tests which accommodate a deterministic level shift at a known point in time are compared in a Monte Carlo study. The tests differ in the way they treat the deterministic term of the DGP. It turns out that Phillips-Perron type tests have very poor small sample properties...

We show in this article that fractionally integrated univariate models for GDP may lead to a better replication of business cycle characteristics. We firstly show that the business cycle features are clearly affected by the degree of integration as well as by the other short run components of...

Multivariate Volatility Models belong to the class of nonlinear models for financial data. Here we want to focus on multivariate GARCH models. These models assume that the variance of the innovation distribution follows a time dependent process conditional on information which is generated by...

This article is concerned with the dynamic behaviour of UK unemployment. However, instead of using traditional approaches based on I(0) stationary or I(1) (integrated and/or cointegrated) models, we use the fractional integration framework. In doing so, we allow for a more careful study of the...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

Fractionally integrated models with the disturbances following a Bloomfield (1973) exponential spectral model are proposed in this article for modelling the U.K. unemployment. This enables us a better understanding of the low-frequency dynamics affecting the series, without relying on any...

We make use in this article of a testing procedure suggested by Robinson (1994) for testing deterministic seasonality versus seasonal fractional integration. A new test statistic is developed to simultaneously test both, the order of integration of the seasonal component and the need of seasonal...

We compare the standard one-bid first price auction to a corresponding two-bid first price auction where each buyer may place two bids: a high bid and a low one and the winner pays his low bid if this was higher than all other bids. We characterize the equilibria of the two mechanisms and prove...