This research points to the serious problem of potentially misspecified alternative hypotheses when testing for unit roots in real exchange rates. We apply a popular unit root test against nonlinear ESTAR and develop a Markov Switching unit root test. The empirical power of these tests against...

In this paper we analyze the convergence of interest rates in the European MonetarySystem (EMS) in a framework of changing persistence. This allows us to estimate the exact date of full convergence from the data. A change in persistence means that a time series switches from stationarity to...

We consider the problem of forecasting time series with long memory when the memory parameter is subject to a structural break. By means of a large-scale Monte Carlo study we show that ignoring such a change in persistence leads to substantially reduced forecasting precision. The strength of...