This paper deals with the analysis and evaluation of sales forecasts of managers, given that it is unknown how they constructed their forecasts. Our goal is to find out whether these forecasts are rational. To examine deviations from rationality, we argue that one has to approximate how the...

In this paper we examine the interaction between data transformation and the empirical evidence obtained when testing for (non-)linearity. For this purpose we examine nonlinear features in 64 monthly and 53 quarterly US macroeconomic variables for a range of Box-Cox data transformations. Our...

In this paper we put forward a new time series model, which describes nonlinearity and seasonality simultaneously. We discuss its representation, estimation of the parameters and inference. This seasonal STAR (SEASTAR) model is examined for its practical usefulness by applying it to 18 quarterly...

Several recent studies show that seasonal variation and cyclical variation in unemployment are correlated. A common finding is that seasonality tends to differ across the business cycle stages of recessions and expansions. Since seasonal adjustment methods assume that the two sources of...

We propose to estimate the parameters of the Market Share Attraction Model (Cooper & Nakanishi, 1988; Fok & Franses, 2004) in a novel way by using a non-parametric technique for function estimation called Support Vector Regressions (SVR) (Vapnik, 1995; Smola, 1996). Traditionally, the parameters of the...

Scanner data for fast moving consumer goods typically amount to panels of time series where both N and T are large. To reduce the number of parameters and to shrink parameters towards plausible and interpretable values, multi-level models turn out to be useful. Such models contain in the second...

The geometric distributed lag model, after application of the so-called Koyck transformation, is often used to establish the dynamic link between sales and advertising. This year, the Koyck model celebrates its 50th anniversary.In this paper we focus on the econometrics of this popular model,and...

We develop a procedure to collect experimental choice data for estimating consumer preferences with a special focus on consumer price evaluations. For this purpose we employ a heteroskedastic mixed logit model that measures the effect of the way prices are specified on the variance of choice....

Macroeconomic time series such as total unemployment or total industrial production concern data which are aggregated across regions, sectors, or age categories. In this paper we examine if forecasts for these aggregates can be improved by considering panel models for the disaggregate series. As...

In this paper we address the question whether countries on the African continent have lower average growth rates in real GDP per capita than countries in Asia and Latin America. In contrast to previous studies, we do not aggregate the data, nor do we a priori assign countries to clusters....