Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Using Video Feedback in Family Therapy

Video recordings have been used for many years in family therapy for supervisory or therapist review purposes, but have usually had little direct relevance for clients. This article describes how video recordings can be used jointly by therapist and family to discuss episodes and themes in the sessions, rather like the current use of reflecting teams. The danger of the abuse of power in video feedback is also discussed — a danger which is present in all forms of therapy, however ‘user friendly’ they aim to be.     

Estimates of Money Demand Functions for Estonia

This paper examines the money demand function of Estonia in the period 1995–2006. Since Estonia has a currency board system, euro area interest rates are taken into account. We apply different cointegration procedures like the Engle–Granger, the dynamic OLS, and the Johansen procedure to estimate the long-run relationship among money, output, and interest rates. The results show that it is difficult to find a cointegrating relationship for the broad money aggregate M2. For the preferred relationship including euro area money market rate and euro area bond rate a dynamic equation is estimated. This dynamic equation is stable for the whole period. The change of the anchor curreny in the currency board and the accession to the European Union do not alter the relationship.      

Interval forecasting in cointegrated systems

In this paper interval forecasting of cointegrated systems is examined. If the estimated coefficients are used to construct the forecasting intervals the error component due to the estimation of the coefficients is omitted in most cases. Analogous to the stationary case of vectorautoregressive models a correction term is derived basing on Johansen’s error correction representation of cointegrated systems. Its usefulness is analysed by means of a Monte Carlo study. The Monte Carlo study firstly demonstrates the difference between the nominal level of the confidence interval of forecasting and the observed level of the interval construction with known coefficients of variance calculation. Secondly, the forecast interval with estimated coefficients is investigated. Thirdly, it is illustrated that the approximation of forecast intervals can be improved by the proposed correction term for a small sample size, if the true cointegration rank is specified.     

Comparisons of tests for multivariate cointegration

This paper compares the small sample properties of different tests for multivariate cointegration like Johansen's trace test, stock &; Watson's common trend test, Phillips &; Ouliaris' principal component test, as well as cointegration rank decisions based on order selection criteria. Under the null hypothesis of non-cointegration we find a slow convergence rate of the test statistics. In bivariate models the Phillips &; Ouliaris test is extremely dependent on the specification and is outperformed by the other procedures. For trivariate processes we find dependence of the power results on the dynamic specification. The lag order is successfully estimated by order selection criteria.     

Panel Seasonal Unit Root Test: Further Simulation Results and An Application to Unemployment Data

Summary: In this paper the seasonal unit root test of Hylleberg et al. (1990) is generalized to cover a heterogenous panel. The procedure follows the work of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2002) and is independently proposed by Otero et al. (2004). Test statistics are given and critical values are obtained by simulation. Moreover, the properties of the tests are analyzed for different deterministic and dynamic specifications. Evidence is presented that for a small time series dimension the power is low even for increasing cross section dimension. Therefore, it seems necessary to have a higher time series dimension than cross section dimension. The test is applied to unemployment data in industrialized countries. In some cases seasonal unit roots are detected. However, the null hypotheses of panel seasonal unit roots are rejected. The null hypothesis of a unit root at the zero frequency is not rejected, thereby supporting the presence of hysteresis effects. * The research of this paper was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The paper was presented at the workshop “Unit roots and cointegration in panel data” in Frankfurt, October 2004 and in the poster-session at the EC2 meeting in Marseille, December 2004. We are grateful to the participants of the workshops and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.