The recent findings by McCoskey and Selden (1997, Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming) that health expenditure and GDP are stationary are driven by the omission of time trends in their ADF regressions. Since both health expenditure and GDP are trending, this omission raise serious doubts on...

This paper presents a likelihood-based panel test of cointegrating rank in heterogeneous panel models based on the mean of the individual rank trace statistics. The existence of the first two moments of the asymptotic distribution of the individual trace statistic is established. Based on this,...

This paper presents a general likelihood-based framework for inference in panel-VAR models with cointegrating restrictions. The cointegrating relations are restricted to each cross-section while the rest of the model is unrestricted. The homogenous restriction of common cointegrating space is...

A bivariate second-order VAR model of money growth and inflation is specified and estimatedby means of least squares. The bias of the parameter estimates is approximated in three ways and new, bias-reduced estimates are computed using the approximations. The effects of bias reduction on...

The generalised entropy measure is applied to decompose overall income inequality over several years into one part showing inequality of long-run (permanent) income and one part showing variability of single individuals' incomes over time. By comparing these components of inequality for pre- and...

Sweden has experienced a sequence of tax and benefit reforms during the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate these extensive reforms from the points of view of labour supply, welfare and inequality. As a basis of the analysis, we use the household labour supply model, which is...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow...