In a recent paper, Zografos [K. Zografos, On Mardia’s and Song’s measures of kurtosis in elliptical distributions, J. Multivariate Anal. 99 (2008) 858–879] has obtained general formulas for Song’s measure for the elliptic family of distributions, and he introduced and studied its sample...

Matched sampling is a methodology used to estimate treatment effects. A caliper mechanism is used to achieve better similarity among matched pairs. We investigate finite sample properties of matching with caliper and propose a slight modification to the existing mechanism. The simulation study...

The properties of an iterative procedure for the estimation of the parameters of an ARFIMA process are investigated in a Monte Carlo study. The estimation procedure is applied to stock returns data for 15 countries.

A new likelihood-based panel cointegration test which allows a linear time trend in the data generating process is proposed. The test is an extension of the likelihood ratio type test with trend adjustment prior to testing to the panel data framework. Under the null hypothesis, the standardized...

Robinson and Marinucci (1998) investigated the asymptotic behaviour of a narrow-band semiparametric procedure termed Frequency Domain Least Squares (FDLS) in the broad context of fractional cointegration analysis. Here we restrict to the standard case when the data are I(1) and the cointegrating...

This paper analyzes the mechanics of VAR forecast pooling and quantifies the forecast performance under varying conditions. To fill the gap between empirical and purely theoretical research we run a Monte Carlo study and simulate the data from different New Keynesian DSGE models. We find that...

Though theoretically appealing and very popular amongst labour economists, the interpretation of the unexplained part of the Oaxaca (1973) decomposition as discrimination rather than an omitted variable problem in cross-section data has often been criticised. In this note it is shown that this...

In this paper I analyse the effects of ignoring level shifts in the data generating process (DGP) on systems cointegration tests that do not accommodate level shifts. I consider two groups of Likelihood Ratio tests based on procedures suggested by Johansen (1988, 1995) and Saikkonen & Lütkepohl...

In this paper, we provide a new framework to assess the validity of Zipf 's Law for cities. Zipf 's Law states that, within a country, the distribution of city sizes follows a Pareto distribution with a Pareto index equal to 1. We adopt a two-step approach where we formally test if the...

Mann-Whitney and Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample tests are the most appropriate tests when the data, which are obtained from independent two-sample, are asked for testing by the help of nonparametric tests. Both Mann-Whitney and Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample tests are nonparametric statistics...