Changes in the seasonal patterns of macroeconomic time series may be due to the effects of business cycle fluctuations or to technological and institutional change or both. We examine the relative importance of these two sources of change in seasonality for quarterly industrial production series...

The paper discusses a simple univariate nonlinear parametric time-series model for unemployment rates, focusing on the asymmetry observed in many OECD unemployment rate series. The model is based on a standard logistic smooth transition autoregressive (LSTAR) model for the first difference of...

In this paper we investigate whether the European unification has had an impact on the Union's average labor productivity growth. Based on a time series approach we do not find a scale-effect as suggested by new growth theory. However, the data do not reject the hypothesis that the EU growth...

This paper examines the relationship between regional economic integration and FDI in North America, where two RIAs have been established over the past decade: a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. (CUSTA) and a trilateral agreement (NAFTA) incorporating Mexico as well....

This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization and banking crises on growth. It shows that financial liberalization spurs on average economic growth. Banking crises are harmful for growth, but to a lesser extent in countries with open financial systems and good institutions. <p> The...</p>

The panel cointegration test of Larsson et al (1998) test for the maximum number of cointegrating relations in a dynamic panel given the assumption of a common cointegrating rank. This paper presents a test for this assumption. The test is based on the test statistic of Larsson et al (1998) and...

In this paper two simple tests to distinguish between unit root processes and stationary nonlinear processes are proposed. New limit distribution results are provided, together with two F type test statistics for the joint unit root and linearity hypothesis against a specific nonlinear...

In this paper we propose a general method for testing the Granger noncausality hypothesis in stationary nonlinear models of unknown functional form. These tests are based on a Taylor expansion of the nonlinear model around a given point in a sample space. We study the performance of our tests by...

The LM type linearity test for STAR nonlinearities is severely distorted when the process is governed by conditional heteroskedasticity. In order to correct the test we propose a parametric bootstrap. It is shown, by means of Monte Carlo methods, that the bootstrap test is almost exact.

Estimating a density function over a bounded domain can be very complicated and resulting in an unsatisfactory or unrealistic density estimate. In many cases a one-to-one transformation can be applied to the considered data set, but there are also situations where such a unique transformation...