Using generalizations of Benford’s Law we test for the absence of psychological barriers at various price levels in eBay auctions for professional football tickets. Our empirical results indicate that this hypothesis cannot be rejected.

We compare testing strategies for Granger noncausality in vector autoregressions (VARs)that may or may not have unit roots and cointegration. Sequential testing methods are examined; these test for cointegration and use either a differenced VAR or a vector error correction model(VECM), in which to...

Previous empirical work that assessed the theoretical results of Lucas (1972) is updated by incorporating recent data, utilizing advancements in time series methods and bootstrapping results. Specifically, the two-stage method of Ball et al. (1988) and others is used, but the functional form...

We use the stochastic volatility model as a basis for investigating the statistical properties of absolute returns as a measure of latent volatility in financial markets. Our results are compared with existing results for squared returns.

In this paper we investigate the impact of data revisions on forecasting and model selection procedures. A linear ARMA model and nonlinear SETAR model are considered in this study. Two Canadian macroeconomic time series have been analyzed: the real-time monetary aggregate M3 (1977-2000), and...

This paper considers the "learning curve" relationship between the aggregate tax rate and the relative size of the hidden economy in New Zealand. Some simple non-linear models are estimated so that the effects of changes in the effective tax rate on the underground economy can be simulated. We...

The Anderson-Darling goodness-of-fit test has a highly skewed and non-standard limit distribution. Various attempts have been made to tabulate the associated critical points, using both theoretical approximations and simulation methods. We show that a standard saddlepoint approximation performs...

This paper continues the investigation of Giles and Williams (2000) on export-led growth (ELG). In the first part, we surveyed the empirical export-led growth literature; it was evident that Granger noncausality tests are commonly applied as a test for ELG. In this paper, we explore the...

This paper first derives an adaptive estimator when heteroskedasticity is present in the unit-specific error in an error component model and then compares the finite sample performance of the proposed estimator with various other estimators. While the Monte Carlo results show that the proposed...

A spurious regression model is one in which the dependent and independent variables are non-stationary, but not cointegrated, and the data are not filtered (e.g., by differencing) before the model is estimated. It is well known that in this case the asymptotic behaviour of the least squares...