This paper assesses whether the economy of East Germany is catching up with the West German region in terms of welfare. While the primary measure for convergence and catching up is per capita output, we also look at other macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment rates, wage rates, and...

This paper shows that the integrated modified OLS (IM-OLS) estimator developed for cointegrating linear regressions in Vogelsang and Wagner (2014a) can be straightforwardly extended to cointegrating multivariate polynomial regressions. These are regression models that include as explanatory...

We consider structural vector autoregressions identified through stochastic volatility. Our focus is on whether a particular structural shock is identified by heteroskedasticity without the need to impose any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our exercise: (i) a set...

We consider integrated modified least squares estimation for systems of cointegrating multivariate polynomial regressions, i. e., systems of regressions that include deterministic variables, integrated processes and products of these variables as regressors. The errors are allowed to be...

In this paper, we introduce a method of generating bootstrap samples with unknown patterns of cross-sectional/spatial dependence, which we call the spatial dependent wild bootstrap. This method is a spatial counterpart to the wild dependent bootstrap of Shao (2010) and generates data by...

We propose using a permutation test to detect discontinuities in an underlying economic model at a known cutoff point. Relative to the existing literature, we show that this test is well suited for event studies based on time-series data. The test statistic measures the distance between the...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate more than one instance of poor bootstrap performance, and to see how available diagnostic techniques can indicate reliably when and how this poor performance can arise. Two particular features that seem to be important to explain bootstrap discrepancy are...

The rank of the spectral density matrix conveys relevant information in a variety of statistical modelling scenarios. This note shows how to estimate the rank of the spectral density matrix at any given frequency. The method presented is valid for any hermitian positive definite matrix estimate...

We show that spline and wavelet series regression estimators for weakly dependent regressors attain the optimal uniform (i.e. sup-norm) convergence rate (n= log n)..p=(2p+d) of Stone (1982), where d is the number of regressors and p is the smoothness of the regression function. The optimal rate...

There are many different approaches to the process of stress testing and two of them will be investigated in this paper. The first one is a stress test performed on aggregated data i.e. the banking system as a whole. The variable of interest in both exercises is the Loan Loss Provision ratio...