Economists and econometricians very often work with data which has been temporally disaggregated prior to use. Hence, the quality of the disaggregation clearly affects the quality of the analyses. Building on Chow and Lin’s (1971) disaggregation model this paper proposes a new estimation approach and a specification test which assesses the quality of the disaggregation model. An advantage of th...

We study equitable allocation of indivisible goods and money among agents with other-regarding preferences. First, we argue that Foley’s (1967) equity test, i.e., the requirement that no agent prefer the allocation obtained by swapping her consumption with another agent, is suitable for our environment. Then, we establish the existence of allocations passing this test for a general domain of pr...

Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for household responses to changes in school inputs. Evidence from India and Zambia shows that student test scores are higher when schools receive unanticipated grants; but there is no impact of grants that are anticipated. We show that the most likely mechanism for this result is that household...

This paper extends the distributional theory for the problem of testing for structural change in the linear model when the timing of the change is unknown, and proposes a simple method of obtaining approximate critical values for the mean-Wald test. The results apply for a very wide range of regressor types, including integrated and trending regressors, and regressors that exhibit their own str...

This paper uses newly available long-span data on real per capita incomes from 1900-2001 to test for stochastic convergence in a diverse group of 29 countries. To perform our tests, we utilize the two-break LM unit root test of Lee and Strazicich (2003) and endogenously determine two distinct structural breaks in level and trend for each country. Despite including both OECD and non-OECD countri...

Asset prices observed in financial markets combine equilibrium prices and market microstructure noise. In this paper, we study how to tell apart large shifts in equilibrium prices from noise using high frequency data. We propose a new nonparametric test which allows us to asymptotically remove the noise from observable price data and to discover jumps in fundamental asset values. We provide its...

The outcome of popular unit root tests depends heavily on the initial condition, i.e. on the difference between the initial observation and the deterministic component. In some applications it is difficult to rule out small or large values of the initial condition a priori, so this dependence can be quite difficult to deal with in practice. We explore a number of methods for constructing unit r...

We develop a test for the linear no cointegration null hypothesis in a threshold vector error correction model. We adopt a sup-Wald type test and derive its null asymptotic distribution. A residual-based bootstrap is proposed, and the first-order consistency of the bootstrap is established. A set of Monte Carlo simulations shows that the bootstrap corrects size distortion of asymptotic distribu...

This paper investigates the nature of the causal relationship between stock prices and macroeconomic aggregates in the foreign sector in India. By applying the techniques of unit–root tests, cointegration and the long–run Granger non–causality test recently proposed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995), we test the causal relationships between the BSE Sensitive Index and the three macroeconomic variable...

This article investigates power and size of some tests for exogeneity of a binary explanatory variable in count models by conducting extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The tests under consideration are Hausman contrast tests as well as univariate Wald tests, including a new test of notably easy implementation. Performance of the tests is explored under misspecification of the underlying model a...