The New Keynsesian Economics and the Output-Inflation Trade-off

macroeconomics, New Keynsesian Economics, Output-Inflation Trade-off

Stock Market Forecastability and Volatility: A Statistical Appraisal

This paper presents and implements statistical tests of stock market forecastability and volatility that are immune from the severe statistical problems of earlier tests. Although the null hypothesis of strict market efficiency is rejected, the evidence against the hypothesis is not overwhelming. That is, the data do not provide evidence of gross violations of the conventional valuation model.

An agent-based model to rural-urban migration analysis

In this paper we analyze the rural-urban migration phenomena as it is usually observed in economies which are in the early stages of industrialization. The analysis is conducted by means of a statistical mechanics approach which builds a computational agent-based model. Agents are placed on a lattice and the connections among them are described via an Ising like model. Simulations on this computational model show some emergent properties that are common in developing economies, such as a transitional dynamics characterized by continuous growth of urban population, followed by the equalization of expected wages between rural and urban sectors (Harris-Todaro equilibrium condition), urban concentration and increasing of per capita income.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Testing for country heterogeneity in growth models using a finite mixture approach

We define a bivariate mixture model to test whether economic growth can be considered exogenous in the Solovian sense. For this purpose, the multivariate mixture approach proposed by Alfo and Trovato is applied to the Bernanke and Gurkaynak extension of the Solow model. We find that the explanatory power of the Solow growth model is enhanced, since growth rates are not statistically significantly associated with investment rates, when cross-country heterogeneity is considered. Moreover, no sign of convergence to a single equilibrium is foun

Health behaviour convergence: evidence from fractional (long memory) convergence and British microdata.

This paper uses a fractional methodology to assess convergence in terms of differences in health quality measures, based on six primary criteria, across the English regions. Hence, it uses the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing database and the retrospective interviews from 16,894 participants, aged 50+, with data from three waves–2004/5, 2006/7 and 2008/9, to establish that health quality is characterized by divergences across six health quality criteria. When the overall sample is differentiated through income, education and employment, the evidence favors convergence, indicating that certain socioeconomic factors impose a uniform behavioral attitude of the population toward health quality criteria.N/