This paper investigates the empirical relevance of different unemployment theories in three major economies, namely the UK, the US and Japan, by estimating the degree of dependence in the unemployment series. Both univariate and multivariate long memory methods are used. The results vary...

This paper investigates the statistical features and the macroeconomic determinants of youth unemployment in a number of European countries. First, it explores its short and long memory properties by estimating both autoregressive and fractional integration models. This type of analysis sheds...

The Ifo Business Climate is the most important indicator for the business cycle in Germany. In 1993 the connection between the two components of the business climate – business situation and business expectations – was graphically portrayed by Ifo in a 4-quadrant scheme: the Ifo Business...

The ‘saving for a rainy day’ hypothesis implies that households’ saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently developed panel cointegration techniques proposed by Pedroni (1999, 2004) and generalized by Banerjee and Carrion-i-Silvestre (2006) to examine the robustness of the PPP concept for a sample of 80 developed and developing countries. We find that strong...

We find that productivity gains in tradables cause an appreciation of the real exchange rate via both tradable and nontradable prices in the CEE-5 and have no affect in the Baltic countries, while they lead to a depreciation of the real exchange rate of tradables in OECD economies that...

This paper analyses the Balassa and Samuelson hypothesis in two groups of European countries: six New Member States (NMS) and six advanced EU-15 economies. It is found that the second stage of the hypothesis, which relates relative sector prices with the real exchange rate, does not hold...

We develop a non-linear forecast combination rule based on copulas that incorporate the dynamic interaction between individual predictors. This approach is optimal in the sense that the resulting combined forecast produces the highest discriminatory power as measured by the receiver operating...

Our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use rich micro survey data covering more than 36,000 Iranian households in 2009. Our micro-simulations show that the direct distribution of resource...