Rob Luginbuhl  Aart de Vos 《Empirical Economics》2003,28(2):365-386

It is generally acknowledged that the growth rate of output, the seasonal pattern, and the business cycle are best estimated simultaneously. To achieve this, we develop an unobserved component time series model for seasonally unadjusted US GDP. Our model incorporates a Markov switching regime to produce periods of expansion and recession, both of which are characterized by different underlying growth rates. Although both growth rates are time-varying, they are assumed to be cointegrated. The analysis is Bayesian, which fully accounts for all sources of uncertainty. Comparison with results from a similar model for seasonally adjusted data indicates that the seasonal adjustment of the data significantly alters several aspects of the full model. First Version Received: January 2001/Final Version Received: February 2002 Send offprint requests to: Rob Luginbuhl?Correspondence to: Rob Luginbuhl  相似文献   

    

Ciaran Driver  Tommaso M. Valletti 《Journal of Economics》2003,79(2):187-198

above the certainty level while for additive uncertainty the price should be lower than the certainty level. This note gives an intuitive explanation for the result after first presenting a parsimonious review of the two models. We also discuss which, if either, of the two models is more realistic. Received December 14, 2001; revised version received July 16, 2002 Published online: April 30, 2003 We thank referees for helpful comments. Ciaran Driver would like to acknowledge the research facilities from ANU, Canberra for their help in writing this paper.  相似文献   

    

Luis A. Gil-Alana 《International Advances in Economic Research》2005,11(3):257-266

In this article, we show that macroeconomic time series may contain unit and fractional roots at both, at zero and at zero and at the seasonal frequencies. The importance of the root at the long run or zero frequency requires in many cases to consider this root at both, separately in an independent polynomial, and also included in the seasonal one. Several Monte Carlo experiments are conducted to examine cases when the root at the zero frequency is not appropriately considered. An empirical application based on the tests of Robinson, Peter M. “Efficient Tests of Nonstationary Hypotheses,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 89, 1994, pp. 1420–37 is also carried out at the end of the article.The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Government of Navarra (“Ayudas de Formación e Investigación y Desarrollo”).  相似文献   

    

Olga Shvetsova 《Constitutional Political Economy》2005,16(2):125-141

William Riker ((1964) Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little Brown) stressed the problem of the contested nature of federal institutions and argued that federations existed amidst the ongoing challenge to their rules, that federal institutions were being continuously endogenously produced in the interaction of political parties rather than serving as self-enforceable constraints on the political process. As parties changed, so did federalism, and eventually the balance was bound to shift to either one or the other extreme as far as the degree of centralization was concerned. An alternative approach to essentially the same problem of federal instability was to conceptualize the underlying game differently, as a game of coordination, so that institutions would be accepted as constraints and would therefore be self-enforceable because they allow the players to avoid the chaos and successfully converge to an outcome with payoffs exceeding their reservation values (Hardin, 1989, Ordeshook, 1992). The third proposed solution, consociationalism, emphasizes the elite effort to overcome the conflictual nature of the institutional choice (Lijphart, 1977). Here, as in the coordination argument, the hope is that one could create incentives for politicians to view the existing rules as advantageous and to avoid redistribution by means of the institutional revision. Yet, just like the coordination argument, it is based on an implicit assumption that politicians are more easily motivated to act “cooperatively” than are their constituencies. The missing step in the literature is the mechanism by which this more or less “cooperative” behavior of elected politicians could be sustainable in the environment of popular accountability. An essential component in building the theory of institutional design is to show the possibility in a democracy of elected politicians cooperating on institutional matters even when each of their constituencies would prefer to adjust the constitutional terms to its own advantage. Elite “cooperativeness” must be sustainable even in the presence of outside challengers promising to stay closer to the constituent preferences. Here, I present a model of mass-elite equilibrium of constitutional legitimacy, which demonstrates the possibility to motivate the incumbents to sustain the institutional stability while at the same time protecting them from electoral defeat. I also discuss the difficulties and limitations that such a solution faces, in particular, in plural societies. JEL classification: H77, D02 In working on this paper, I have benefited from the discussions with Mikhail Filippov, Peter Ordeshook, Charles Kromkowski, Carol Mershon, and from the comments of the participants of the conference on ‘‘Micro-Foundations of Federal Institutional Stability’’ at the MicroIncentives Research Center at Duke University, Durham, NC, April 30–May 1, 2004, and of the Lansing Lee proseminar at the University of Virginia. The responsibility for the many remaining flaws is solely mine.  相似文献   

    

B. M. S. van Praag 《Journal of Economics》2004,82(3):313-315

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Oscar Alfranca  Joan Oca  Lourdes Reig 《International Advances in Economic Research》2004,10(2):150-158

The objective of this paper is to estimate the dynamics of aquaculture and fish prices as a response to price shocks. The vector autoregression approach will be used to explain the dynamics of the sea bream market in both cultured and wild fishing. The main result is that changes in public regulation or in production conditions could stimulate production responses which may take time to settle. Usually, the change is a matter of adjusting between equilibria over a period of time, with the pattern and speed of the adjustment, depending on the nature and degree of disequilibrium in the fishing system. Comments from reviewers have been incorporated into the paper and are gratefully acknowledged. Financial support was provided by Direcció General de Recerca, Departament d'Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació project N^o SGR2001-160.  相似文献   

    

Yueyun Chen  Iskandar S. Hamwi  Tim Hudson 《International Advances in Economic Research》2003,9(1):20-34

The Capital Asset Pricing Model has been used frequently to derive a fair price of insurance. But the use of this model overestimates insurance premiums because it does not account for the insolvency risk of insurers. This paper examines how the insurance price should be fairly adjusted when insurers' default risk is considered. It develops a model which shows that fair insurance premiums are lower when insurance firms have a positive probability of being insolvent. Using data of property liability insurers during the period from 1943–99, the paper further estimates the effects of the insolvency risk on insurers' underwriting profit rate. It shows that the incorporation of the default risk of insurers in the model, by significantly reducing the required price for insurance, would lead to lower profit potentials. Some writers argue that including the insolvency risk when calculating insurance premiums is not so necessary because of the existence of states' guaranty insurance funds which protect consumers. However, as shown in the paper, these funds have provided inadequate protection to consumers. Therefore, because of the increase in the number of insolvencies in recent years, and because of the limited coverage provided by states' guaranty funds, it seems that considering the insolvency risk in insurance pricing has become very necessary.  相似文献   

    

Konstantine Gatsios 《Journal of Economics》2002,77(1):23-33

This paper develops a two-good, small-country, general-equilibrium trade model with endogenous labor supply, where trade is restricted by a tariff or an import quota. Within this framework, it is shown that, contrary to Anam (1989), under an import quota domestic and world prices may vary in the same direction. This is due to the possibly positive employment effects of terms of trade shocks. In such a case, compared to fixed labor supply, variable labor supply is likely to make the domestic prices less sensitive to foreign price volatility. Received June 13, 2001; revised version received November 14, 2001  相似文献   

    

Anthony Shorrocks  Daniel Slottje 《Journal of Economics》2002,77(1):91-117

Stochastic dominance and Lorenz dominance are examples of orderings which require unanimous agreement among an infinite set of indices. This paper considers various subsets of inequality measures that respect Lorenz dominance, and assesses the extent to which a small number of indices can reproduce the Lorenz ordering. Using income data for 80 countries, our results suggest that Lorenz dominance can be predicted with 99% accuracy using just 3 or 4 inequality measures, as long as two of them focus on the extreme upper and lower tails of the distribution. In contrast, confining attention to the index families and parameter ranges normally considered may fail to detect the majority of occasions when Lorenz curves intersect. These results lead us to question the faith placed in procedures based on a finite set of inequality indices, and to suggest that similar lessons will apply to other types of unanimity orderings.  相似文献   

    

Didier G. R. Soopramanien  Robert Fildes  Alastair Robertson 《Applied economics》2013,45(17):2159-2166

This article studies how adoption and usage behaviour of the Internet and online shopping, respectively influence the preference to use electronic commerce to purchase different types of products. We empirically model the preference for electronic commerce when consumers have to buy different types of products and thus face different types of risks (Cox and Rich, 1964 Cox, D and Rich, S. 1964. Perceived risk and consumer decision making-the case of telephone survey. Journal of Marketing Research, 1: 32–9. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Unlike previous research, we find that consumers who have previously shopped online, display stronger preferences to buy products on the Internet irrespective of the perceived level of product-specific risks of online shopping. This article provides an interesting and novel insight into how both adoption and usage of electronic commerce impact on the attitude and risk perception of buying less predictable (more risky) products on the Internet.  相似文献