The interest in business cycle asymmetry has been steadily increasing over the last fifteen years. Most research has focused on the different behaviour of macroeconomic variables during expansions and contractions, which by now is well documented. Recent evidence suggests that such a two-phase...

Regime-switching models, like the smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) model are typically applied to time series of moderate length. Hence, the nonlinear features which these models intend to describe may be reflected in only a few observations. Conversely, neglected outliers in a linear...

In this paper we investigate the properties of the Lagrange Multiplier (LM) test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) in the presence of additive outliers (AO's). We show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely affected...

This paper provides new evidence on the rationality of industrial production (IP) and the producer price index (PPI). However, rather than examining preliminary and fully revised data, as is usually the practice, we examine the entire revision history for each data series. Thus, we are able to...

This paper studies the economic development process, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for a large panel of countries. We propose a methodology that identifies groups of countries (convergence clubs) that show similar GDP structures, while allowing for changes in club memberships over...

We analyse the impact of the Engle and Granger (1987) article by its citations over time, and find evidence of a second life starting in the new millennium. Next, we propose a possible explanation of the success of this citation classic. We argue that the conditions for its success were just...

This article proposes a modified method for the construction of diffusion indexes in macroeconomic forecasting using principal component regres- sion. The method aims to maximize the amount of variance of the origi- nal predictor variables retained by the diffusion indexes, by matching the data...

Realized variance, being the summation of squared intra-day returns, has quickly gained popularity as a measure of daily volatility. Following Parkinson (1980) we replace each squared intra-day return by the high-low range for that period to create a novel and more efficient estimator called the...

This paper demonstrates that the class of conditionally linear and Gaussian state-space models offers a general and convenient framework for simultaneously handling nonlinearity, structural change and outliers in time series. Many popular nonlinear time series models, including threshold, smooth...

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is the most expressive standard language for modeling ontologies on the Semantic Web. In this paper, we present a temporal extension of the very expressive fragment SHIN(D) of the OWL-DL language resulting in the tOWL language. Through a layered approach we...