Stationarity Of Health Expenditures And Gdp: Evidence From Panel Unit Root Tests With Heterogeneous Structural Breaks

This paper re-examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and GDP in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 OECD countries over the period from 1960 to 1997. Previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust. We advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel LM unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts. In contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks, our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Panel Lm Unit-Root Tests With Level Shifts

This paper proposes a new panel unit-root test based on the Lagrangian multiplier (LM) principle. We show that the asymptotic distribution of the new panel LM test is not affected by the presence of structural shifts. This result holds under a mild condition that N/T → k, where k is any finite constant. Our simulation study shows that the panel LM unit-root test is not only robust to the presence of structural shifts, but is more powerful than the popular Im, Pesaran and Shin (IPS) test. We apply our new test to the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis and find strong evidence for PPP. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005

International trade and developing countries: an empirical investigation of the Linder hypothesis

This paper presents empirical evidence in support of the Linder hypothesis for five of the six East African developing countries studied here: Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. This finding implies that these countries trade more intensively with others who have similar per capita income levels, as predicted by Linder. The contributions of this research are three-fold. First, new information is provided on the Linder hypothesis by focusing on developing countries. Second, this is one of very few analyses to capture both time-series and cross-section elements of the trade relationship by employing a panel data set. Third, the empirical methodology used in the analysis corrects a major shortcoming in the existing literature by using a censored dependent variable in estimation.