This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyse the causal relationship between foreign ownership and plant productivity. To control for the possible endogeneity of the FDI decision, a difference-in-differences approach is combined with propensity score...

While there is considerable empirical evidence on the impact of liberalizing trade in goods, the effects of services liberalization have not been empirically established. This study examines the link between services sector reforms and the productivity of manufacturing industries relying on...

Conventional explanations for the post-1991 growth of India’s manufacturing sector focus on goods trade liberalization and industrial de-licensing. We demonstrate the powerful contribution of a neglected factor: India’s policy reforms in services. The link between these reforms and the...

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...

We consider the problem of optimally combining individual forecasts of gross domestic product (GDP) and inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) dataset for the Euro Area. Contrary to the common practice of using equal combination weights, we compute optimal weights which...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted under the assumption of mean squared error loss. Under this loss function optimal forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single-period horizon with increasing...