Applied Economics Letters

This paper raises the question whether population growth is exogenous or endogenous with respect to the development process of Bangladesh during the last three decades. The results of an unrestricted vector autoregression model indicate that population growth does not Granger cause real GDP per capita. On the contrary, the results clearly indicate that real GDP per capita Granger causes population growth. Based on the results one may conclude that population growth is endogenous in the development process of Bangladesh. This is reflected both in the Granger causality tests and the decompositions of variances of detrended real GDP per capita and population growth.

Applying Hsiao's version of the Granger causality method, an examination is carried out into the causality between fertility (BR) and female labour (FR) participation for Japan over the period 1950-1993. A unidirectional causality appears to run from BR to FR without feedback. The F-statistics show that fertility negatively affects female labour force participation but not vice versa. It appears that women's employment does not hinder the probability of having more children, but having small children at home strongly discourages them from seeking outside employment.

Applying Hsiao's version of the Granger causality method, this paper examines the causality between fertility and female labour participation using transformed US data for the period 1948-93. The PP tests reveal that the original series are not stationary; therefore, a first differencing is performed. This study finds that there is a undirectional causality running from BR to FR with no feedback. The results confirm the hypothesis that the presence of small children discourages a woman from seeking employment outside the house, yet employment does not affect women's decision to have children.

The effect of welfare on family size is estimated by means of an ordered probit analysis on low-income, two-parent families. A multiyear cross-sectional pooled data set derived from the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey over the period 1979-1990 is analysed. Behavioural impacts from a range of economic variables are consistent in sign with theoretical predictions and are reasonable in magnitude. A $1000 increase in the amount of welfare per child can be expected to increase the number of children by 2.2% for such families.

"This study empirically investigates the impact of state income tax policy on U.S. interstate migration [of the labor force] for the period 1985-89. It finds that people vote with their feet and prefer to move so as to minimize their state income tax liabilities."

One of the main issues associated with recent R&D-based growth models is their prediction concerning "scale effects". That is, these models ask the question as to whether economic growth is a function of the level or the growth rate of human capital at steady state. This note presents some cross-country and historical time series evidence that supports scale effects in the early stages of development and non scale effects in the long-run. Copyright 2002 by Taylor and Francis Group

This article presents the first set of empirical results on the effects of the events of 11 September 2001, on individual flying demand using data collected before and after these atrocities.

The purpose of this article is to use observed changes in hours of work and labour force participation to draw inferences regarding behavioural responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. Using the Current Population Survey and controlling for differences in demographics, labour market conditions and a time-invariant unobserved individual fixed effect, we determine that for most sub-samples there was no change in labour force participation or in hours of work after 9/11 relative to before. Exceptions were women, who increased their labour force participation, and workers living in the proximity of one of the 9/11 events, who increased their hours of work. These results are consistent with a precautionary increase in labour supply during an uncertain time, and with others' documentation of women responding more dramatically to external stressors.

I compare education-, income- and wealth-related health inequality using data from 11 European countries and the US. The health distributions in the US, England and France are relatively unequal independent of the stratifying variable, while Switzerland or Austria always have relatively equal distributions. Some countries such as Italy dramatically change ranks depending on the stratifying variable.

This study analyses data gathered from surveys conducted immediately before and after 11 September, 2001, that elicit respondents’ preferences for neighbourhood attributes using a conjoint analysis instrument administered via mail to two randomly selected, mutually exclusive samples of homeowners in Franklin County, Ohio. Sample demographics and income variables were similar. It is found that, prior to 11 September 2001, respondents react to an array of neighbourhood characteristics; the estimated utility model fits the data well. For the data collected after 11 September 2001, only housing density and park availability attributes are significant explanatory variables in the estimated utility model.

Cointegration analysis is often used in empirical studies of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to test whether there is a long-run relationship among countries' bilateral exchange rates and price levels. But the presence of a cointegrated relationship is not enough to support PPP, as other restrictions must be met as well. Nevertheless, even simple cointegration has been rejected for many countries in previous studies. We apply the ‘bounds testing’ approach of Pesaran et al. (200114. Pesaran , M. H. , Shin , Y. and Smith , R. J. 2001. Bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 16: 289–326. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references), which has only seen limited use thus far, to analyse 123 countries' bilateral rates with the United States. Besides testing for cointegration, we also assess whether our long-run coefficients support the PPP hypothesis. We find that while most rates are indeed cointegrated, only a few have coefficients that meet even one of the necessary restrictions for PPP.

The Friday the 13th anomaly discussed by Kolb and Rodriguez in 1987 is revisited in an international context. Using the FTSE world indices over the period 1988-2000, for 19 countries, it is found that there is some evidence that returns on Friday the 13th are statistically different from, and generally greater than, returns on other Fridays. Copyright 2001 by Taylor and Francis Group

In this study, we apply the panel Seemingly Unrelated Regressions Augmented Dickey–Fuller (SURADF) tests developed by Breuer et al. (20011. Breuer , J. B. , McNown , R. and Wallace , M. S. 2001. Misleading inferences from panel unit-root tests with an illustration from purchasing power parity. Review of International Economics, 9: 482–93. [CrossRef]View all references) to revisit the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) for 16 Latin American countries. The empirical results from several panel-based unit root tests indicate that PPP does not hold for these 16 countries under study. However, panel SURADF tests indicate that PPP is valid for 3 of these 16 countries. These results have important policy implications for these 16 Latin American countries under study.

This study further investigates the long-run impact of various sources of technological progress on productivity for a panel of 16 OECD countries during the period 1981 to 1998. Given the length of the series, the application of an heterogeneous estimator could be suitable from an econometric point of view. Our results, based on the Mean Group and the Pooled Mean Group estimators, show that technology spills over across countries through the channel of trade flows and that academic research significantly contributes to productivity.

This article examines the time series properties of oil prices and economic development for 17 oil-rich developing countries. Cointegration and error-correction estimation results indicate that in the majority of cases oil booms are followed by increases in both GDP per capita and investment.

This paper considers unit root tests of the index of British industrial production 1700-1913. For the full sample the data are found to be I(1). However, three distinct phases are identified with alternating stationarity properties. One period, 1780-1851, is identified as the British Industrial Revolution. The results support the findings of Perron (1989) and Reichlin (1989) on the dangers of unit root testing in models with structural change.

This paper provides empirical evidence concerning the long-run properties of expected real interest rate and nominal interest rate as a predictor of inflation using US and UK data from 1803 to 1990. It is found that we can reject the null hypothesis of constancy of ex ante real interest rate for the US, but we cannot reject it for the case of the UK. Evidence also suggests that over the long time period, nominal interest rate does not seem to be a good predictor of inflation, especially for the case of the US.

The paper uses cointegration techniques and a variety of different price-level and interest-rate proxies to investigate the presence of the Gibson paradox in UK data for the period 1821-1913. Qualified evidence is found in favour of the paradox.

This paper studies the impact of fiscal policy on economic activity by using Chilean annual data from 1833 to 2000. The data allows us to disentangle the impacts on economic activity -- due to the large variation in fiscal policy in the period under study -- by using a SVAR methodology. The study finds evidence of non Keynesian impacts of fiscal policy.

This paper studies the impact of fiscal policy on economic activity by using Chilean annual data from 1833 to 2000. The data allows us to disentangle the impacts on economic activity -- due to the large variation in fiscal policy in the period under study -- by using a SVAR methodology. The study finds evidence of non Keynesian impacts of fiscal policy.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the phenomena of trade liberalization and market integration in 19th century Spain and their effect on the geographical concentration of industrial activity. This empirical analysis confirms the existence of positive relationships between the degree of scale economies and industrial concentration and also between the degree of centrality and industrial concentration. The empirical data on trade policy show that protectionist policies did not foster a geographical concentration of industry in the 19th century Spanish economy. Copyright 2002 by Taylor and Francis Group

We report estimates of long-run and short-run money demand functions in Italy over the period 1861-1980 which are robust in terms of passing a range of diagnostic tests and exhibit a fairly high degree of parameter stability. The results are comparable to those of previous analysis of long-run data for the United States and the United Kingdom.

We apply the outlier methodology to the issue of the regulation of Bimetallism. Did French and British central banks use their discount rates as a policy tool for currency stabilization over the period 1850-1870? The common view identifies Bimetallism as a pure automatic system constrained by specie points. Using outliers methodology we give evidence that the influence of the discount rate differential between France and England on the Sterling-Franc spot exchange rate was taken in default only on one occasion, on February 1861. The assessment of the historical context helps to understand this peculiar event which was only transitory. This article is an illustration of the importance of the outlier methodology in cliometrics as a mean to test conventional wisdom in economic history.

This letter presents estimates of a stable long-run money demand function in Italy over the period 1861-1980. Results using the Johansen procedure of cointegration indicate a unique, long-run demand function for currency and the broad money supply. In each case, the real income and interest rate elasticities accord reasonably well with expectations from monetary theory in terms of size and sign and are in line with results reported in several studies for the United States and the United Kingdom. It appears that both currency and the money supply broadly defined are suitable aggregates with which to consider the long-run economic impacts of changes in monetary policy in Italy.

This article studies the relationship between the business cycle and alcohol sales in Sweden using a data set for the years 1861-2000. Using wavelet-based band-pass filtering, it is found that there is a pro-cyclical relationship, i.e. alcohol sales increases in short-term economic upturns. Using moving window techniques, we see that the pro-cyclical relationship holds over the entire time period. We also find that alcohol sales are a long-memory process with nonstationary behaviour, i.e. a shock in alcohol sales has persistent effects.