In this paper, a likelihood ratio approach is taken to derive a test of the economic convergence hypothesis in the context of the linear deterministic trend model. The test is designed to directly address the nonstandard nature of the hypothesis, and is a systematic improvement over existing...

This paper proposes powerful and serial correlation robust test statistics that can be used to test for the presence of structural change in the trend function of a univariate time series. Four models are analyzed, each model corresponding to a different way in which a trend break might occur....