Recent investigations of the transmission mechanism of German monetary policy arrive at quite different conclusions regarding its stability during the period of monetary targeting by the Bundesbank. In this study small dynamic models for the monetary sector of the German economy are analyzed in...

The small sample properties of two types of Chow tests are investigated in the context of multiple time series models. It is found that the tests may have substantially distorted size if the sample size is not large relative to the number of parameters in the model under study. In particular the...

This paper provides new evidence on the nature of occupational differences in unemployment dynamics, which is relevant for the debate between the structural or hysteresis hypotheses. We develop a procedure that permits us to test for the presence of a structural break at unknown date. Our...

The potential mutation of the Sub-Prime banking crisis into a sovereign debt one in Euro area countries is investigated. After reviewing the criteria used to measure the debt vulnerability, the balance sheet approach (BSA) is presented in order to illustrate the potential connections between...

This paper examines the spillover effects of sovereign rating news on European financial markets during the period 2007-2010. Our main finding is that sovereign rating downgrades have statistically and economically significant spillover effects both across countries and financial markets. The...

This paper proposes an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economy with an implicit market for productive time. In this economy, agents have limited productive time and can choose to produce in autarky, buy productive time from helpers to increase own production or, sell their...

Determining whether a data set contains one or more outliers is a challenge commonly faced in applied statistics. This paper introduces a distribution-free test for multiple outliers in data drawn from an unknown data generating process. Besides, a sequential algorithm is proposed in order to...

To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...