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...

Recent research has found evidence that supports the purchasing power parity (PPP) condition in developed countries using very long-span data, while evidence for developing countries is almost nonexistent. This paper tries to fulfill this void by testing the validity of PPP as a long run...

The Perron test is the most commonly applied procedure to test for a unit root in the presence of a structural break of unknown timing in the trend function. Deriving the Perron-type test regression from an unobserved component model, it is shown that the test regression in fact is nonlinear in...

This paper examines the major sources of economic growth in Iran using annual time series data (1960 to 2003). The time series properties of the data are analysed by Perron’s innovational outlier and additive outlier models. The empirical results based these models show that there is not...

Applications of panel unit root tests have become commonplace in empirical economics, yet there are ambiguities as how best to interpret the test results. This note clarifies that rejection of the panel unit root hypothesis should be interpreted as evidence that a statistically significant...

The selection of the truncation lag for covariate unit root tests is analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation. It is shown that standard information criteria such as the BIC or the AIC can result in tests with large size distortions. Modifi ed information criteria can be used to construct tests...

This paper examines the major determinants of GDP growth in Iran using annual time series data spanning from 1960 to 2003. The Iranian economy has been subject to a multitude of structural changes and regime shifts during the sample period. Thus, time series properties of the data are first...

This paper examines the major sources of economic growth in Iran using annual time series data (1960 to 2003). The time series properties of the data are analysed by Perron’s innovational outlier and additive outlier models. The empirical results based these models show that there is not...

Foreign direct investment has become an important factor of development of economies in the last decades. However, its economic nature as well as its relationship with corruption has not yet been clarified in economic literature. Following previous theoretical research, mainly Dunning’s...

We analyze the asymptotic distributions associated with the seasonal unit root tests of the Hylleberg et al. (1990) procedure for quarterly data when the innovations follow a moving average process. Although both the t- and F-type tests suffer from scale and shift effects compared with the...