Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

The seasonal adjustment method proposed by Schlicht (1981) can be viewed as a method that minimizes non-stochastic deviations (perturbations). This interpretation gives rise to a critique of the seasonality criterion used there. A new seasonality criterion is proposed that avoids these...

The paper discusses a new seasonality hypothesis which is one part of a weighted regression approach for the decomposition of a time series into a trend, a seasonal component and an irregular component. It is shown that there exists a regression formulation leading, as in the descriptive...

If the established rules are obeyed spontaneously in an economy, this increases economic efficiency since the uncertainties, monitoring costs and incentive problems induced by opportunism can be avoided. Opportunism will be increasedby increasing the incentives for unlawful behaviour, however,...