The paper provides Monte Carlo evidence on the performance of general-to-specific and specific-to-general selection of explanatory variables in linear (auto)regressions. In small samples the former is markedly inefficient in terms of ex-ante forecasting performance.

What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the (SI) relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allow to...

We introduce a new, factor based bootstrap approach which is robust under heteroskedastic error terms for inference in functional coefficient models. Modeling the functional coefficient parametrically, the bootstrap approximation of an F statistic is shown to hold asymptotically. In simulation...

Healthcare expenditure has increased substantially in all western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the Analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...