in a structural time series regression model, binary variables have been used to quantify qualitative or categorical quantitative events such as politic and economic structural breaks, regions, age groups and etc. the use of the binary dummy variables is not reasonable because the effect of an event decreases (increases) gradually over time not at once. the simple and basic idea in this paper i...

abstract this paper attempts to re-investigate the catching-up (stochastic convergence) hypothesis among the selected 16 oecd countries applying the time series approach of convergence hypothesis with annual data over one century. to reach this aim, we propose a model which specifies a trend function, incorporating both types of structural breaks – that is, sharp breaks and smooth shifts using ...

The literature on structural breaks focuses on ex post identification of break points that may have occurred in the past. While this question is important, a more challenging problem facing econometricians is to provide forecasts when the data generating process is unstable. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general methodology for forecasting in the presence of model instability. We ma...

This special issue deals with problems related to unit roots and structural change, and the interplay between the two. The research agenda dealing with these topics have proven to be of importance for devising procedures that are reliable for inference and forecasting. Several important contributions have been made. Still, there is scope for improvements and analyses of the properties of existi...

This paper proposes estimators of location and size of structural breaks in a, possibly dynamic, nonparametric regression model. The structural breaks can be located at given periods of time and/or they can be explained by the values taken by some regressor, as in threshold models. No previous knowledge of the underlying regression function is required. The paper also studies the case in which ...