Re-examination of convergence hypothesis among Indian states in panel stationarity testing framework with structural breaks

This article examines the conditional income convergence hypothesis for 17 major states in India for the period of 1960–2012. Univariate stationarity tests without structural breaks provide evidence against the convergence hypothesis. However, when two or more structural breaks are applied in per capita income series, the incomes of around 11–13 states are found to stochastically converge to the national average. This finding supports the convergence hypothesis for the panel as a whole after accounting for two data features, cross-sectional dependence and structural breaks in incomes, using a unified panel stationarity testing framework.     

Fourier ADL cointegration test to approximate smooth breaks with new evidence from Crude Oil Market

Economic data is typically subject to a number of different forms of structural breaks. Ignoring structural breaks in a model can lead to misspecification issues and false conclusions. This paper proposes a new Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ADL) cointegration test in the presence of nonlinear breaks approximated by a Fourier function. The test offers a simple way to capture smooth structural change in time series data. Exact break dates are not required, and the suggested methodology can accommodate unknown number and form of gradual structural change. The testing procedure circumvents the potential power loss which can result from adding more dummy variables in the testing equation. Simulation results show that our procedure has good size and power properties. We demonstrate our test on the empirical example of real oil prices, oil production, and real economic activity, which are subject to structural breaks. The new test suggests that variables are cointegrated, while a conventional ADL test ignores structural breaks and concludes the opposite. This result casts some doubt on conventional oil price models.     

PPP in the 34 OECD countries: evidence from quantile-based unit root tests with both smooth and sharp breaks

Conventional unit root tests have mostly failed to validate the PPP. Quantile-based unit root tests by previous research have provided some support for the PPP. In this article, we take an additional step and incorporate sharp shifts and smooth breaks into the quantile-based unit root test and re-examine the PPP in each of the 34 OECD countries over the period 1994:01–2016:03. We find support for the PPP in 18 countries of Austria, Chile, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom.     

Modelling with flexibility through the business cycle: using a panel smooth transition model to test for the lipstick effect

ABSTRACT

Consumer spending typically declines during periods of economic distress, but observers have noted that lipstick purchases appear to increase during recessions, which is often referred to as the lipstick effect. However, the existence of such effect has remained empirically unconfirmed. Using weekly retail scanner data on lipstick sales from 2006 to 2016 in the United States, we applied a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) demand model to test the relationship between economic distress and lipstick sales. This flexible demand specification allows regression coefficients to vary as a function of an exogenous macroeconomic variables and fluctuate asymmetrically, non-linearly, and time-varyingly across an unlimited number of regimes. Empirical results show the income elasticity of demand for lipstick decreased rapidly from 0.31 to 0.05 during the 2007–2009 recession, then slowly rebounded to 0.31 by the second quarter of 2014, thus first empirically confirming the existence of the lipstick effect.     

Resource drag in an endogenous growth context: a panel data-based estimation with cross-sectional dependences and structural breaks

The article develops a resource drag model based on the endogenous growth theory, and provides fresh empirical evidence to estimate the drags for China by using the recently developed panel model with both cross-sectional dependences and structural breaks. The results indicate that there exists a long-run equilibrium relationship between GDP and its inputs, and both the land and water resources have significantly positive impacts on GDP except from some provinces after allowing for cross-sectional heterogeneities and structure breaks. In addition, the study employs the common correlated effects estimators to investigate the resource drags at both the pooled and individual levels. The result shows that the aggregate drag reduces annual growth rate by about 0.016 percentage points in China as a whole while there exist significant differences in both these disaggregate and aggregate drags for the province-groups, suggesting there is a fair amount of geographic clustering for them.     

Testing for PPP in developing countries using confirmatory analysis and different base countries: an application to Asian countries

Previous studies on PPP have tested either the null hypothesis of non-stationary or the null of a stationary real exchange rate and used the US as the base country and focused on industrialized countries. It has been argued that testing either null is insufficient to confirm the presence of PPP. It has also been noticed that the results are sensitive to the choices of the base country; for instance, the US versus Germany. In contrast to previous studies, this paper uses different unit root tests, confirmatory analysis, and different base countries to test PPP for a sample of developing countries in Asia during the current float. Overall, the results do not seem to be sensitive to the choice of the base country, and joint rejections are not present but joint non-rejections are far more common. Using Perron's test, which allows for a one-time break in the series, the results indicate evidence of stationarity for Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand when the US is the base country. When Japan is the base country, evidence of stationarity is detected only for Indonesia.