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The work of Card and Krueger has cast doubt on the nature of the relationship between the minimum wage and teenage employment in the United States. The earlier 'consensus' finding of a small but statistically significant negative effect was based on time series data whereas Card and Krueger's findings are based mainly on cross-section data. In this article, we re-examine the time series relationship between minimum wage and teenage employment. We find that previous models break down due to their inability to capture changes in the trend, cyclical and seasonal components of teenage employment. We propose an alternative approach in which these components are treated as stochastic components and which contains the traditional, deterministic approach as a special case. The model when estimated up to 1979 accurately predicts what happens to teenage employment subsequently, when the minimum wage was frozen after 1981 and then increased quite substantially in the early 1990s. Moreover, we find that there is a significant, negative effect of

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Generic Bordeaux red wine (basic claret) can be regarded as being similar to an agricultural commodity. Production volumes are substantial, they are traded at high frequency and the quality of the product is relatively homogeneous. Unlike other commodities and the top-end wines (which represent only 3% of the traded volume), there is no futures market for generic Bordeaux wine. Reliable forecasts of prices can to large extent replace this information deficiency and improve the functioning of the market. We use state-space methods with monthly data to obtain a univariate forecasting model for the average price. The estimates highlight the stochastic trend and the seasonality present in the evolution of the price over the period 1999 to 2016. The model predicts the path of wine prices out of sample reasonably well, suggesting that this approach is useful for making reasonably accurate forecasts of future price movements.