The move to a pay-as-you-earn income tax system in Iceland in 1987-1988 made income earned in 1987 tax-free. Using a sample of 9,274 individuals for the years 1986, 1987 and 1988, we calculate the labour-supply response of this change and find that total labour supply rose by 6.7% in 1987 over...

This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...

Il ruolo della politica economica all'interno di un sistema economico, ed in particolare la capacità o meno da parte di questa di esercitare un'influenza attiva, efficace e duratura sulla dinamica delle principali variabili macroeconomiche, è sempre stato un tema al centro dell'attenzione e...

The paper presents a nonparametric approach, based on kernel density estimators, to assess and compare persistence of output fluctuations in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the Unated States. The results obtained are interpreted to be compatible in general...

In this paper we simulate a series which is segmented trend plus noise. Despite the imposed data generating process, usual tests for unit roots and estimates of persistence fail to reject the random walk hypothesis.

A procedure based on density estimation is suggested in the paper to discriminate trend stationary processes about local linear time trends from difference stationary processes. A 'rule of thumb' is constructed to detect the suitability of a segmented trend representation, and a regression...

One of the stylized facts of unemployment is that shifts in its mean rate between decades and half-decades account for most of its variance. In this paper, we use a purely statistical analysis based on nonparametric densitity estimation techniques to identify the dates of infrequent changes in...

We focus in these paper on Granger shifts or structural breaks. We show that when the assumption of parameter constancy is violated, due to occurrence of structural breaks, Granger causality tests can provide misleading inference about the underlying relationship of causality. We consider a...