In this paper we document the results of a forecast evaluation exercise for the real world price of crude oil using VAR models estimated by sparse (regularization) estimators. These methods have the property to constrain single parameters to zero. We find that estimating VARs with three core...

We use nonparametric methods to compute the environmental inefficiency of 100 countries over the period 1990-2017 on the macro-level. The inefficiency is expressed as the potential reduction of GHG emissions, holding economic output constant. Based on that, we estimate different trend functions...

We investigate economic and institutional determinants of ICT infrastructure for a broad cross section ofmore than 100 countries. The ICT variable is constructed from a principal components analysis. The explanatory variables are selected by variants of the Lasso estimator from the machine...