This note proposes a tool to investigate and demonstrate the adequacy of the central limit theorem in small samples. The suggested testing procedure provides a method to investigate if the mean estimator is approximately normally distributed, given data and sample size at hand. This is important...

A bank that lends money to a household faces two types of risk. Most commonly mentioned is the risk of a default. Hardly ever referred to is the risk of an early redemption of the loan - leading to dormancy. We model consumer loans' transition from an active to a dormant state and estimate a...

The incidence and duration of work-absence spells for a sample of Swedish blue-collar workers in 1990 and 1991 are analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier non-parametric estimator, discrete-time hazard regression as well as stratified Cox regression. We focus on the effect of economic incentives, i.e.,...

The incidence and duration of work absence spells for a sample of Swedish blue collar workers in 1991 are analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier estimator, discrete time hazard regression as well as stratified Cox regression. The main interest is directed towards the effect of economic incentives. The...

This paper contains two novelties. First, a unified framework for testing and evaluating the adequacy of an estimated autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) model is presented. Second, two new classes of ACD models, the smooth transition ACD model and the time-varying ACD model, are...

We study the product turnover in an industry and, in particular, the survival of new products. The data set consists of monthly sales of all products sold in the Swedish beer market over the time period of 1989-1995. The death rates of newly introduced products are high - out of 199 products an...

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...

Departures from an economic equilibrium should be mean reverting. The deviations are often assumed to be integrated of order zero but this is too restrictive. It is sufficient that the shocks are integrated of an order less than one, i.e. they may be fractionally integrated. A fractionally...