The debate on the relationship between environmental regulation and competitiveness has been a topic of discussion for a number of years now. As early as 1991, the American economist Michael E. Porter proposed that stringent environmental regulation (under the condition that it is efficient) can...

This paper explores the potential for futures contracts in tropical (hardwood) plywood, one of the few major internationally traded commodities for which there is no yet a futures market. Commodity characteristics and market structures and practices that have an impact on the feasibility of a...

Regional econometric forecasting accuracy assessment has traditionally received less attention than its macroeconometric counterpart. While evidence is available that state and local employment forecasts perform well relative to standard benchmarks, little is known about the historical...

Recently municipal household income has been estimated with spatial econometrics techniques explicitly including spatial autocorrelation in the econometric models. Spatial econometric tools have highly improved the explicative and predictive capacity of the models and more effort must be done in...

We argue that the current framework for predictive ability testing (e.g., West, 1996) is not necessarily useful for real-time forecast selection, i.e., for assessing which of two competing forecasting methods will perform better in the future. We propose an alternative framework for...

This paper is an exercise in applied macroeconomic forecasting. We examine the forecasting power of a vector error-correction model (VECM) that is anchored by a long-run equilibrium relationship between Greek national income and productive public expenditure as suggested by the economic theory....

In this paper we propose a simple model to forecast industrial production in Italy. We show that the forecasts produced using the model outperform some popular forecasts as well as those stemming from a trading days- and outlier-robust ARIMA model used as a benchmark. We show that the use of...

In this paper we study simple time series models and assess their forecasting performance. In particular we calibrate ARMA and ARMAX (where the exogenous variable is the system load) processes. Models are tested on a time series of California power market system prices and loads from the period...

This paper models an inflation forecast density framework that closely resembles actual policy makers behaviour regarding the determination of the modal point, the uncertainty and asymmetry in the inflation forecasts. The framework combines policy makers prior information about these parameters...