Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

This paper discusses pooling versus model selection for now- and forecasting in the presence of model uncertainty with large, unbalanced datasets. Empirically, unbalanced data is pervasive in economics and typically due to di¤erent sampling frequencies and publication delays. Two model classes...

Many practical problems require nonparametric estimates of regression functions, and local polynomial regression has emerged as a leading approach. In applied settings practitioners often adopt either the local constant or local linear variants, or choose the order of the local polynomial to be...

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognized as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified...

When comparing two competing approximate models using a particular loss function, the one having smallest `expected true error' for that loss function is expected to lie closest to the underlying data generating process (DGP) given this loss function and is therefore to be preferred. In this...

This paper presents a survey on the application of heuristic optimization techniques in the broad field of finance. Heuristic algorithms have been extensively used to tackle complex financial problems, which traditional optimization techniques cannot efficiently solve. Heuristic optimization...