The use of asymptotic critical values in stationarity tests against the alternative of a unit rot process is known to lead to overrejections in finite samples when the considered process is stationary but highly persistent. We claim that in recent parametric tests this is caused by estimation...

Healthcare expenditure has increased substantially in all western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the Analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational...

It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...

This paper analyzes short term portfolio investment opportunities in a capital market where a currency is defined as a currency basket, i.e. a linear combination of foreign currencies. In line with the mean-variance hedging approach, we determine a self-financed optimal investment strategy which...

The annual structure of the real GDP in the UK, France, Germany and Italy is examined in this article by means of fractionally integrated techniques. Using a version of a testing procedure due to Robinson (1994), we show that the series can be specified in terms of I(d) statistical models with d...