We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has beenachieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distributionof GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures.While in the first year after unification, the two...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolutionfrom 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinctgrowth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictlymonotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...

A new method for testing linear restrictions in linear regression models is suggested. It allows to validate the linear restriction, up to a specified approximation error and with a specified error probability. The test relies on asymptotic normality of the test statistic, and therefore...