The existence of nominal rigidities and inflation differentials between countries offers two of the main rationales for an inflation buffer in a monetary union where monetary policy is oriented towards an area-wide inflation objective. Evidence accumulated since 2003 suggests that nominal...

This paper investigates why the slope of the yield curve predicts future economic activity in Germany and the United States. A structural VAR is used to identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, monetary policy and inflation scare shocks and to analyze their effects on the real, nominal and...

The occurrence of unit roots in economic time series has far reaching consequences for univariate as well as multivariate econometric modelling. Therefore, unit root tests are nowadays the starting point of most empirical time series studies. The oldest and most widely used test is due to Dickey...

We assume that some consistent estimator of an equilibrium relation between non-stationary fractionally integrated series is used in a first step to compute residuals (or differences thereof). We propose to apply the semiparametric log-periodogram regression to the (differenced) residuals in...

We show that specific nonlinear time series models such as SETAR, LSTAR, ESTAR and Markov switching which are common in econometric practice can hardly be distinguished from long memory by standard methods such as the GPH estimator for the memory parameter or linearity tests either general or...

We show that tests for a break in the persistence of a time series in the classical I(0) - I(1) framework have serious size distortions when the actual data generating process exhibits long-range dependencies. We prove that the limiting distribution of a CUSUM of squares based test depends on...

We show that the CUSUM-squared based test for a change in persistence by Leybourne et al. (2007) is not robust against shifts in the mean. A mean shift leads to serious size distortions. Therefore, adjusted critical values are needed when it is known that the data generating process has a mean...

We develop a Wald type test to distinguish between long memory and ESTAR nonlinearity by using a directed-Wald statistic to overcome the problem of restricted parameters under the alternative. The test is derived from two basic model specifications where the first is the standard model based on...

In ESTAR models it is usually difficult to determine parameter estimates, as it can be observed in the literature. We show that the phenomena of getting strongly biased estimators is a consequence of the so-called identification problem, the problem of properly distinguishing the transition...

While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-run concept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economic belief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing time series models, i.e. the exponential...