In this note the unobserved component approach underlying the software package SEATS is compared with the Beveridge-Nelson type of decomposition for seasonal time series. The main strength of the SEATS approach lies in the appealing model formulation and the careful specification and adjustment...

Rational bargaining behavior depends crucially on the rules of bargaining, especially on whether parties decide sequentially or independently. Whereas in ultimatum bargaining the proposer can exploit the responder, independent commitments result in more balanced payoffs. To limit the scope of...

A test procedure based on ranks is suggested to test for nonlinear cointegration. For two (or more) time series it is assumed that there exist monotonic transformations such that the normalised series can asymptotically be represented by independent Brownian motions. Rank test procedures based...

When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...

Individuals frequently transfer commodities without an explicit contract or an implicit enforcement mechanism. We design an experiment to study whether such commodity transfers can be viewed as investments based on trust and reciprocity, or whether they rather resemble presents with...

In this paper we characterize what has sometimes been referred to in the literature as instantaneous causality, by examining the consequences of temporal aggregation in (possibly) Granger causal systems of variables. Our approach is to compare the concept of contemporaneous correlation due to...

To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...

Following Bierens (1997a,b) and Vogelsang (1998a,b), unit root tests can be constructed which are asymptotically invariant to parameters involved by the short run dynamics of the process. Such an approach is called nonparametric by Bierens (1997b) and can be used to test a wide range of...