The study implements the flexible nonlinear inference approach of Hamilton (2001) to assess the validity of Okun's law. Using US quarterly data from 1948:1 to 2004:2, overwhelming evidence is found of nonlinearity between cyclical components of unemployment and output. However, the relationship...

In a recent interesting article, Minier (2003) uses results from regression tree techniques to conclude that, for countries with high stock market capitalization, there exists a significantly positive relationship between the level of financial development and economic growth. However, the...

This article provides the first empirical evidence by employing an endogenous switching regression model to investigate whether the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) alters the <italic>relationships</italic> between inflation and inequality as well as between openness and inequality. Using a large panel of...

This article explores the treatment effects of inflation targeting (IT) on unemployment rates across a large panel of 74 countries over the 1980--2010 period. By addressing the 'self-selection' problem of policy adoption via a variety of propensity score matching algorithms, we first find that,...

This study applies a novel quantile unit root with structural breaks approach to explore whether the international crude oil markets are better characterized as 'globalized' or 'regionalized'. By using the spreads between WTI and Brent crude oil prices as a benchmark, we find that the spreads...

The study uses data on 14 countries (Taylor, 1994) to investigate if the saving-retention coefficient varies with country size. A novel semiparametric smooth-coefficient approach of Koop and Tobias (2005) is employed to make posterior inference via the Gibbs sampler algorithm. Empirical results...

This article empirically tests for convergence in Consumer Price Indices (CPIs) across 17 major cities in the United States over the period 1918 to 2008. Although the conventional panel unit root tests generally fail to reject the null hypothesis of nonstationarity, the panel LM tests of Im et...

This paper develops a practical sampling scheme for Bayesian analysis of correlated censored data using the seemingly unrelated Tobit regressions model. Posterior inference is performed via the Gibbs sampler with data augmentation algorithm. In particular, the relevant full conditional...