In this paper, the authors test the convergence hypothesis in a cross-section of 119 countries by means of bootstrap multimodality tests and non parametric density estimation techniques. By looking at the density distribution of GDP across countries in 1970, 1980 and 1989, we find low mobility...

One of the stylized facts of unemployment is that shifts in its mean rate between decades and half-decades account for most of its variance. In this paper, we use a statistical analysis based on Markov switching regression models to identify the dates of infrequent changes in the mean of the...