This paper develops a particular technique for extracting market expectations from asset prices. We use the term structure of interest rates to estimate the probability the market attaches to a country, Italy, joining the European Monetary Union at a given date. The extraction of such a...

Lobato and Robinson (1998) develop semiparametric tests for the null hypothesis that a series is weakly autocorrelated, or I(0), about a constant level, against fractionally integrated alternatives. These tests have the advantage that the user is not required to specify a parametric model for...

We consider changes in the degree of persistence of a process when the degree of persistence is characterized as the order of integration of a strongly dependent process. To avoid the risk of incorrectly specifing the data generating process we employ local Whittle estimates which uses only...