This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...

Since the 1970s the characteristics of international business cycles have changed and deeper economic integration has modified the features of cross-country comovement. We formally test for correlation shifts in measures of real economic activity and economic/financial integration. In Europe we...

The Standard & Poor's Indices Versus Active Funds (SPIVA) Scorecard reports performance of actively managed Canadian mutual funds corrected for survivorship bias and shows equal and asset weighted peer averages.Domestic Equities: For 2009, only 30.4% of Canadian Equity active funds were able to...

This study provides estimates of the price and orishima substitution elasticities between energy and non-energy inputs in two Canadian energy-intensive manufacturing industries: Primary Metal and Cement. The elasticities are estimated using annual industry-level KLEM data (1961-2003) and relying...

I show that the process of Canadian economic growth differs across disaggregates (provinces and industries), with little mobility in the cross-section ordering, ie the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. In the steady-state, industry disaggregates display divergence. I find that a...

Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

The author proposes a new test for financial contagion based on a non-parametric measure of the cross-market correlation. The test does not depend on the assumption that the data are drawn from a given probability distribution; therefore, it allows for maximal flexibility in fitting into the...

We examine the mean-reverting properties of real exchange rates, by comparing the unit root properties of a group of international real exchange rates with two groups of intra-national real exchange rates. Strikingly, we find that while the international real rates taken as a group appear...