Standard panel unit root tests (PURTs) are not robust to breaks in innovation variances. Consequently, recent papers have proposed PURTs that are pivotal in the presence of volatility shifts. The applicability of these tests, however, has been restricted to cases where the data contains only an...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

Structural vector autoregressive analysis aims to trace the contemporaneous linkages among (macroeconomic) variables back to underlying orthogonal structural shocks. In homoskedastic Gaussian models the identification of these linkages deserves external and typically notdata-based information....

Persistent variations in the log price-to-dividend ratio (PtDR) have triggered a lively discussion in the literature. This paper proposes a present value model incorporating this persistence through a time-varying steady state of the PtDR. Log-likelihood statistics confirm that the time-varying...

In this dissertation new test statistics for the (panel) unit root hypothesis are presented. Besides a novel approach to testing the unit root hypothesis in univariate time series, the major part of this thesis is dedicated to unit root testing in cross sectionally dependent panels with...