This paper investigates whether using natural logarithms (logs) of price indices for forecasting inflation rates is preferable to employing the original series. Univariate forecasts for annual inflation rates for a number of European countries and the USA based on monthly seasonal consumer price...

What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the SI relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allows to...

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the...

Access to health care in the United States remains greatly disproportionate across socioeconomic groups. It is not known, however, whether the disparities between the socioeconomic categories are increasing or decreasing. This analysis used a well-established non-parametric technique, employing...

We estimate price regressions for surgical procedures used to treat colon cancer, a leading cause of cancer mortality. Using a claims database for self-insured employers, we focus on transaction prices, rather than more commonly available billing data that do not reflect actual payments made....

Persistent variations in the log price-to-dividend ratio (PtDR) have triggered a lively discussion in the literature. This paper proposes a present value model incorporating this persistence through a time-varying steady state of the PtDR. Log-likelihood statistics confirm that the time-varying...

We investigate for 26 OECD economies whether their current account imbalances to GDP are driven by stochastic trends. Regarding bounded stationarity as the more natural counterpart of sustainability, results from Phillips-Perron tests for unit root and bounded unit root processes are contrasted....