A probabilistic forecasting method to predict thunderstorms in the European Eastern Alps is developed. A statistical model links lightning occurrence from the ground-based ALDIS detection network to a large set of direct and derived variables from a numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. The...

This paper shows that the Fed reacts to change in spreads between corporate bond yields and government bond yields over and beyond their information content on future inflation and future activity. This result, obtained in a GMM framework, is confirmed by simulation methods. Moreover, when...

This paper challenges the assumption that the inflation process within the euro area is well-described by a linear Phillips curve and investigates in a nonparametric framework how inflation is sensitive to output growth. An asymmetric output-inflation trade-off is pointed out in the euro area at...

This article deals with the estimation of a time-varying coefficients equation with endogenous regressors. A non-parametric approach is proposed, combining the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) with the smoothing splines litterature as in Hodrick and Prescott (1981). This new method is used to...

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the...

Although building operating charges have turned out to be a major determinant of profitability for real estate investments, there is a noticeable lack of reports or studies that analyze these costs with state-of-the-art statistical techniques. Specifically, past studies usually assume linear...

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. With the constant rise of computational power even very complex models can be estimated on virtually any modern computer. Moreover, interest has shifted from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models...