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...

In this paper we consider deterministic seasonal variation in quarterly production for several European countries, and we address the question whether this variation has become more similar across countries over time. Due to economic and institutional factors, one may expect convergence across...

The Caribbean region is a cross road of international and regional container traffic. Most of the islands in the region have also adopted ambitious strategies to become prime locations for container transshipment. This paper introduces a tool that can be used to visualise and analyse the...

Schering spends considerable effort to undertake product recovery activities in pharmaceutical production. The two main recovery activities are by-product recycling and solvent reuse. The main driver for engaging in these activities is economical. Recovery leads to annual savings of...

We propose in this paper an algorithm for solving linearly constrained nondifferentiable convex programming problems. This algorithm combines the ideas of the affine scaling method with the subgradient method. It is a generalization of the dual and interior point method for min-max problems...

For many least-squares decomposition models efficient algorithms are well known. A more difficult problem arises in decomposition models where each residual is weighted by a nonnegative value. A special case is principal components analysis with missing data. Kiers (1997) discusses an algorithm...

We develop a sequential testing approach for a structural change in the parameters of an autoregression, which amounts to a monitoring procedure with a controlled asymptotic size as we repeat the test. Our method can be used as a general misspecification test. We apply our method to monthly US...

We try to argue that in a computable general equilibrium model, household preferences should be modeled by the indirect addilog system (IAS) rather than by the frequently used linear expenditure system (LES). Both systems have the same data requirement and are as easy to implement, but IAS...

This paper presents the results of a survey held amongst all editorial board members of six journals. These journals in part focus on the development of models and methods for forecasting. The key question was whether one believes that the forecasting discipline has made progress in the last...

We study a deterministic linear-quadratic (LQ) control problem over an infinite horizon, and develop a general apprach to the problem based on semi-definite programming (SDP)and related duality analysis. This approach allows the control cost matrix R to be non-negative (semi-definite), a case...