Based on six harmonized cross-sections of the German Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure, we study inter-temporal changes in poverty from year 1978 to 2003. Results are decomposed by region and household types, and the bootstrap method is applied to test for the statistical significance of...

In vector autoregressive analysis confidence intervals for individual impulse responses are typically reported to indicate the sampling uncertainty in the estimation results. A range of methods are reviewed and a new proposal is made for constructing joint confidence bands, given a prespecified...

It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The...