The statistical properties of inflation and, in particular, its degree of persistence and stability over time is a subject of intense debate and no consensus has been achieved yet. The goal of this paper is to analyze this controversy using a general approach, with the aim of providing a...

This paper proposes a new time-domain test of a process being I(d), 0 d = 1, under the null, against the alternative of being I(0) with deterministic components subject to structural breaks at known or unknown dates, with the goal of disentangling the existing identification issue between...

Although it is commonly accepted that most macroeconomic variables are nonstationary, it is often difficult to identify the source of the non-stationarity. In particular, it is well-known that integrated and short memory models containing trending components that may display sudden changes in...

In an interesting paper Diebold and Senhadji (1996) showed that U.S. GNP data was not as uniformative as many believed as to whether trend was better described as deterministic (trend-stationarity) or stochastic (unit root). By using long data spans and new econometric techniques, they showed...

The existence of a private cost borne by audited taxpayers affects the tax enforcement policy. This is so because tax auditors will face now two sources of uncertainty, namely, the typical one associated with taxpayers' income and that associated with the taxpayers' idiosyncratic attitude...

I present a general theorem on preference aggregation. This theorem implies, as corollaries, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Wilson's extension of Arrow's to non-Paretian aggregation rules, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem and Sen's result on the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal. The theorem...

Barberà and Coelho (2006) documented six screening rules associated with the rule of k names that are used by different institutions around the world. Here, we study whether these screening rules satisfy stability. A set is said to be a weak Condorcet set la Gehrlein (1985) if no candidate in...

A decision-maker exhibits preference for flexibility if he always prefers any set of alternatives to its subsets, even when two of them contain the same best element. Desire for flexibility can be explained as the consequence of the agent's uncertainty along a two-stage process, where he must...