This paper analyses the time series properties of the unemployment rates of the 50 US States, as well as the global rate of the USA. Our results, based on the use of ADF-type tests, show that the inclusion of some breaks is vital in order to reduce the persistence on these rates. Thus, we can...

The detection of additive outliers in integrated variables has attracted some attention recently, see e.g. Shin et al. (1996), Vogelsang (1999) and Perron and Rodriguez (2003). This paper serves several purposes. We prove the inconsistency of the test proposed by Vogelsang, we extend the tests...

This paper analyses the impact of oil price shocks on both the GDP growth and on inflation in the economy of Spain and its seventeen regions. The Qu and Perron (2007) and the Bai and Perron (1998, 2003a and 2003b) methods identify different periods across the sample. Evidence of a diminishing...

This paper analyses the convergence of US house prices. Our results confirm the existence of some degree of segmentation in the US housing market. We also provide robust evidence that the bursting of the housing price bubble has altered this market, observing different results when the sample...

This paper analyses to what extent the Spanish regions have undergone a process of convergence since 1980. The application of unit root techniques to the data of the Human Development Index allow us to show that the evolution of the Spanish economy can be understood as a sum of divergent forces,...

This paper shows that the acceptance of the Zipf's Law may sometimes be the result of a spurious artifact. By way of some Monte Carlo exercises we provide evidence in favour of the fact that the Zipf's law can be spuriously accepted when the variable being studied is generated by a random...

This paper studies the behavior of the HEGY statistics for quarterly data, for seasonal autoregressive unit roots, when the analyzed time series is deterministic seasonal stationary but exhibits a change in the seasonal pattern. As a by-product we analyze also the HEGY test for the nonseasonal...

The detection of additive outliers in integrated variables has attracted some attention recently, see e.g. Shin et al. (1996), Vogelsang (1999) and Perron and Rodriguez (2003). This paper serves several purposes. We prove the inconsistency of the test proposed by Vogelsang, we extend the tests...