A time series (t=921) of weekly survey data on vote intentions in the Netherlands for the period 1978-1995 shows that the percentage of undecided voters follows a cyclical pattern over the election calendar. The otherwise substantial percentage of undecided voters decreases sharply in weeks...

-Theory- Two theories about trends in left-right political orientations are juxtaposed: the persistence theory claiming that left-right orientations are highly resistant to change versus the irrelevance theory anticipating a move of mass publics towards the center of the left-right continuum....

We show that there is no formal statistical testing method to combine categories in a standard ordered regression model. We discuss practical implications of this result.

In contrast to abundant theoretical literature, there are almost no empirical studies on how individuals actually deal with cash. In this paper we analyze euro transactions, made during various games of Monopoly® (European edition), where in some games we deliberately left out one of the notes....

We propose a new periodic autoregressive model for seasonally observed time series, where the number of seasons can potentially be very large. The main novelty is that we collect the periodic parameters in a second-level stochastic model. This leads to a random-coefficient periodic...

It frequently occurs that experts adjust forecasts from statistical models. There is some evidence that such adjusted forecasts can lead to substantially better performance. Little is known about competence and confidence effects in what these experts do. Theoretical and experimental results in...

Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts. Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on three questions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts and model forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

Due to high and low volatility periods, time series of absolute returns experience temporary level shifts (that is, periods with outliers) which differ in length and size. In this paper we put forward a new model which can describe and forecast the location and size of such level shifts. Our so...

We introduce a multi-level smooth transition model for a panel of time series variables, which can be used to examine the presence of common non-linear features across many such variables. The model is positioned in between a fully pooled model, which imposes such common features, and a fully...

Time series with bubble-like patterns display an unbalance between growth and acceleration, in the sense that growth in the upswing is “too fast” and then there is a collapse. In fact, such time series show periods where both the first differences (1-L) and the second differences (1-L)2 of...