The inherent assumption with most Monte Carlo techniques is that one may ignore autocorrelations, but doing so compromises the quality of the prediction from the data. Simulations that do not take account of autocorrelation will not properly model reality, as there is significant autocorrelation...

Do regions converge? This essay provides an overview of the key developments in the study of regional convergence, discussing the methodological issues that have arisen since the first attempts to analyse convergence and critically surveying the results that have been obtained for different...

Conditional distributions for the analysis of convergence are usually estimated using a standard kernel smoother but this is known to be biased. Hyndman et al. (1996) thus suggest a conditional density estimator with a mean function specified by a local polynomial smoother, i.e. one with better...