Summary measures of the overall strictness of a country's employment protection laws have proven popular constructs in cross-country studies of the covariation of labour market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable position in the rankings, and is often alleged...

A unifying framework for inference is developed in predictive regressions where the predictor has unknown integration properties and may be stationary or nonstationary. Two easily implemented nonparametric F-tests are proposed. The test statistics are related to those of Kasparis and Phillips...