This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We employ the PANIC method to test the null of nonstationarity for the common and idiosyncratic components separately. We find significant evidence of...

We evaluate the usefulness of bias-correction methods for autoregressive (AR) models in terms of out-of-sample forecast accuracy, employing two popular methods proposed by Hansen (1999) and So and Shin (1999). Our Monte Carlo simulations show that these methods do not necessarily achieve better...

The present paper develops a model with US cotton exports de- pending on the stock-to-use ratio, trade weighted exchange rates, and the relative cotton prices. The role of inventories in cotton consumption is ex- amined in five textile producing cotton importers, China, Indonesia, Thailand,...

This paper empirically investigates the performance of transfer students from two-year colleges to four-year institutions at the course-level, especially colleges with significant minority student population. Advantages of looking at transfer student's performance at the course level are;...

Islamic banking is consistent with Islamic law and guided by Islamic economics. They are prohibited from charging or paying interest, and can operate only on the basis of the profit-sharing arrangements. Islamic banking has been gaining momentum on a global scale for the last 30 years. It is...

The present paper empirically investigates the cointegrating relation between housing prices and economic fundamental variables in the US housing market. Employing simple yet rigorous econometric techniques, the present paper finds strong evidence in favor of cointegrating relations in most US...

This paper estimates exchange rate sensitivity of US cotton imports for three textile producers with floating or regularly adjusting exchange rates since the 1970s, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Thailand. The cotton import market model includes mill use, US production cost, and an alternate supply....

The least squares (LS) estimator suffers from signicant downward bias in autoregressive models that include an intercept. By construction, the LS estimator yields the best in-sample fit among a class of linear estimators notwithstanding its bias. Then, why do we need to correct for the bias? To...

This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We first employ the PANIC method to identify the common and idiosyncratic components. Powerful recursive mean adjustment (RMA) methods are used to...