The lag in effect of monetary policy contains vital information for the policy evaluation. Allowing for a time-varying treatment effect, we show that Inflation Targeting (IT) effectively lowers inflation for both developed and developing countries. Developed countries reach their targets rapidly...

This paper evaluates monthly stock index price from the Taiwan stock market for evidence of weak form market efficiency. Four empirical methodologies are employed: the Ljung-Box Q test, the binomial distribution test, the runs test and the unit root test of stationarity in stock prices....

By using stock daily data for Thailand and the four Asian Tigers, this paper provides clear evidence that currency depreciation affects adversely stock returns and/or increases market volatility over the period of the Asian crisis 1997-1999. The implication is that international investors and...

In a recent interesting paper, Frank (2009) investigated the long-run inequality--growth nexus with a large panel of annual data for the 48 states in the United States over the 1945 to 2004 post-war period. By implementing the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimators, Frank (2009) concluded that there...

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,...

The Kuznets hypothesis, that is, inequality first rises and then falls as the economy advances, is often tested by regressing inequality on income and its squared term (along with other determinants). Findings of a significantly negative coefficient on income and a significantly positive...

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 letter reconsiders the empirical tests of the new Keynesian and new classical models performed by Ball Mankiw and Romer and Akerlof, Rose and Yellen. The original tests conform basically to cross-section analysis; we develop both time-series and pooled cross-section, time-series tests of...

The United States banking industry experienced a period of poor performance in the late 1980s. Significant problems with loans as reflected in loan loss provisions and net charge offs hampered bank profitability. We examine the effect of portfolio composition on net charge offs at large...