This paper investigates the extent of per-capita income convergence in regional integration initiatives. Panel unit root testing is performed on 28 regional groupings. There is evidence of convergence in South- South integration, but this might be taking place to the bottom.

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence about the existence or non- existence of structural breaks in exchange rates of European transition economies. We used the testing procedure of Vogelsang (1997) that allows for detecting a break at an unknown date in the trend function of a dynamic...

Various methods were proposed to understand the linkages in an input- output system; however many focused only on the identification of key sectors in the economy. An alternative approach, identifying analytically importance of elements and combinations of elements was proposed as a field of...

The financial time series are often characterized by similar volatility structures. The selection of series having a similar behavior could be important for the analysis of the transmission mechanisms of volatility and to forecast the time series, using the series with more similar structure. In...

For about twenty years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad...

We argue that the current framework for predictive ability testing (e.g., West, 1996) is not necessarily useful for real-time forecast selection, i.e., for assessing which of two competing forecasting methods will perform better in the future. We propose an alternative framework for...

Testing for unit roots in short-term interest rates plays a key role in the empirical modelling of these series. It is widely assumed that the volatility of interest rates follows some time-varying function which is dependent of the level of the series. This may cause distortions in the...

This paper addresses the issue of designing finite-sample corrections to information matrix tests. We review a Cornish-Fisher correction that has been proposed elsewhere and propose an alternative, Bartlett-type correction. Simulation results for skewness, excess kurtosis, normality and...

In this paper we develop tests of functional form that are consistent against a class of nonlinear "smooth transition" models of the conditional mean. Our method is an extension of the consistent model specification tests developed by Bierens (1990), de Jong (1996) and Bierens and Ploberger...