How to compute the BDS test: a software comparison

Assessing Non-Linear Structures in Real Exchange Rates Using Recurrence Plot Strategies

Computers and young workers' wages in europe

In this work evidence was found that wage differentials are in favour of those workers who have a home computer. In order to achieve these results the frontier stochastic method and the Kernel filter for analising errors was used. The research is based on the data provided by the survey of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). Taking this survey as a starting point, a data panel is built containing those individuals that have remained in the sample for seven consecutives years. The results demonstrate that with the execption of Denmark, workers in each analised country, i.e. Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom have a wage premium measured by its closeness to the wage front…

Assessing nonlinear structures in real exchange rates using recurrence plot strategies

Purchasing power parity (PPP) is an important theory at the basis of a large number of economic models. However, the implication derived from the theory that real exchange rates must follow stationary processes is not conclusively supported by empirical studies. In a recent paper, Serletis and Gogas [Appl. Finance Econ. 10 (2000) 615] show evidence of deterministic chaos in several OECD exchange rates. As a consequence, PPP rejections could be spurious. In this work, we follow a two-stage testing procedure to test for nonlinearities and chaos in real exchange rates, using a new set of techniques designed by Webber and Zbilut [J. Appl. Physiol. 76 (1994) 965], called recurrence quantificatio…

Testing Independence: A New Approach

In time series analysis and modelling, testing for independence allows us to determine if the estimated model is correctly specified. In this work, we present a very simple method to test for serial independence, based on the two-dimensional embedding vectors (the so-called “2-histories”), and we analyse the power and size of such a procedure against a wide set of linear and nonlinear alternatives.

Tests for time reversibility: a complementarity analysis

Abstract Since time reversibility (TR) is a necessary condition for an independent and identically distributed (iid) sequence, several tests for TR have been suggested to be applied as tests for model misspecification. In this paper, we analyze possible complementarities among two well known TR tests (Ramsey and Rothman's test, and Chen et al.'s test) in two situations: (1) the fitted model is a linear ARMA model when the true data generating process is a nonlinear-in-mean model (either threshold autoregressive or bilinear), and (2) the fitted model is a symmetric GARCH model but the true process belongs to the asymmetric GARCH family (either EGARCH or GJR). The results suggest that there a…

Recurrence Plots in Nonlinear Time Series Analysis: Free Software

Recurrence plots are graphical devices specially suited to detect hidden dynamical patterns and nonlinearities in data. However, there are few programs available to apply such a mehodology. This paper reviews one of the best free programs to apply nonlinear time series analysis: Visual Recurrence Analysis (VRA). This program is targeted to recurrence analysis and the so-called Recurrence Quantitative Analysis (RQA, the quantitative counterpart of recurrence plots), although it includes many procedures in a friendly visual environment. Comparisons with alternative programs are performed.

Testing the Martingale Property of Exchange Rates: A Replication

In this paper, we test the martingale property of a set of U.S. exchange rates already analyzed in a recent paper by Yilmaz [J. of Buss. and Ec. Stat., 2003]. We claim that the tests used by Yilmaz are not the most convenient to test the martingale hypothesis (or the equivalent martingale difference of the returns); hence, we compute a recently proposed test by Kuan and Lee [Stud. in Nonlin. Dyn. and Econ., 2004] and compare our results to Yilmaz's. Striking differences arise, which can give a clue about the type of data generating process governing the evolution of exchange rates in each sub-period.