In the recent past, more and more economists have raised the question whether theoretical assumptions made in applied economics correspond to reality. This paper estimates a consumption function for nondurable consumer goods and services which best utilizes the information contained in the data....

Retail sales immediately before Christmas (in December) and exceeding a "normal level" may be termed "Christmas sales". Econometric models were used to adjust the time series on retail sales for changes in tax codes and calendar effects and then to decompose the resulting series into trend,...

This paper deals with an alternative approach to treating seasonality in error correction models for consumption with a parsimonious parameterization as proposed by Harvey and Scott. We introduce an unobserved seasonal component into an error correction model for Austrian consumer expenditures...

The article tests a procedure for spotting and eliminating statistical outliers in economic time series which does not require previous information on the location of outliers and which estimates model parameters and outliers simultaneously. Results for three different time series suggest that...