Empirical Economics

Clark, J.; Klein, K.

doi: 10.1007/BF01180698pmid: N/A

The relationship between Nerlovian partial adjustment models and error correction models is explored. Unit root tests are employed to test stationarity of price, area and stock data of crops in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The data are found to be consistent with unit root non-stationarity. Evidence in favour of cointegrating relationships among area price and stock data is found. However, evidence in favour of the error correction form of the Nerlovian partial adjustment model is weak, indicating that more investigation of richer theoretical and empirical models of the short run dynamics of area response in Saskatchewan is needed.

Su, Shew-Jiuan; Yen, Steven

doi: 10.1007/BF01180699pmid: N/A

The double-hurdle and infrequency-of-purchase models are generalized with the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation in the dependent variable. The resulting specifications feature more flexible parameterization and error distributions than the untransformed models. Using the 1987–88 Nationwide Food Consumption Survey data on household pork consumption, a nonnested test suggests that the IHS double-hurdle model provides better characterization of the data-generating process than the IHS infrequency-of-purchase model but the elasticities derived from these models are similar. Own-price effects on the probability and level of consumption are negative and significant, but the elasticities are small. Income and cross-price effects are not significant. Household age composition, education, gender of meal planner, and race are among the demographic variables that affect consumption.

Stiassny, Alfred

doi: 10.1007/BF01180700pmid: N/A

Based on structural VARs, this paper proposes a spectral decomposition which allows to infer the effects of changes in one variable on the other variables in the frequency domain. It is shown that there is a close relationship between this concept and conventional forecast error variance decomposition techniques for VARs. An empirical example demonstrates the usefulness of this additional tool in analyzing the relationships among time series.

Kumbhakar, Subal; Bhattacharyya, Arunava

doi: 10.1007/BF01180701pmid: N/A

This paper considers an econometric approach to measure total factor productivity (TFP) growth and technical change (TC) for 31 publicly-owned passenger-bus companies in India during 1983–1987. A translog variable cost function is used to represent the production technology. Firm heterogeneity is incorporated in the cost function using an error component model with firm-specific variances. TFP growth is decomposed into TC and economies of scale components. The TC component is further decomposed into pure, non-neutral, scale, and quasi-fixed factors/network components. An ownership group-wise comparison reveals that the public undertakings exhibit the highest rate of productivity growth, followed by the units operated by the state and local governments. The main source of TFP growth for the public undertakings and government-operated units is economies of scale, while the main source of falling TFP growth for corporations is technological regress.

Winkelmann, Rainer

doi: 10.1007/BF01180702pmid: N/A

A new approach for modeling under-reported Poisson counts is developed. The parameters of the model are estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. An application to workers absenteeism data from the German Socio-Economic Panel illustrates the fruitfulness of the approach. Worker absenteeism and the level of pay are unrelated, but absence rates increase with firm size.

Røed, Knut

doi: 10.1007/BF01180703pmid: N/A

This paper investigates empirically the presence ofunemployment hysteresis in 16 OECD countries, applying aggregate quarterly unemployment rates covering the past 25 years. Alternative test procedures are discussed and employed, posing both stationarity and hysteresis as null hypotheses. The results suggest that hysteresis effects are highly significant in Australia and Canada, and to a lesser extent also significant in most European countries and in Japan. Only in the USA, the presence of unemployment hysteresis is strongly and consistently rejected.

Hansen, Gerd; Kim, Jeong-Ryeol

doi: 10.1007/BF01180704pmid: N/A

This paper analyses the relation between money and inflation in Germany in a cost-push/demand-pull model of an open small economy by means of cointegration methods. The full-information-maximum-likelihood method of Johansen as well as structural methods are applied to datasubsets and the full data set. The focus of the paper is on tests for overidentifying restrictions and for weak and strong exogeneity within these data sets. The result of the paper is that the money stock, the price level and gross national product are endogenous whereas the interest rate and the real import price are both weakly and strongly exogenous. By means of the price cointegration relation we illustrate how monetary targeting should react to imported inflation.

Burke, Michael; Carter, John; Gominiak, Robert; Ohl, Daniel

doi: 10.1007/BF01180705pmid: N/A

We test whether violations of expected utility theory in an Allais-paradox environment are sensitive to monetary incentives. Like Harrison (1994), we find that violations are significantly reduced when lotteries are real rather than hypothetical.