This paper assesses whether the economy of East Germany is catching up with the West German region in terms of welfare. While the primary measure for convergence and catching up is per capita output, we also look at other macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment rates, wage rates, and...

This paper analyzes the role of common data problems when identifying structural breaks in small samples. Most notably, we survey small sample properties of the most commonly applied endogenous break tests developed by Brown, Durbin, and Evans (1975) and Zeileis (2004), Nyblom (1989) and Hansen...

Housing fever is a popular term to describe an overheated housing market or housing price bubble. Like other financial asset bubbles, housing fever can inflict harm on the real economy, as indeed the US housing bubble did in the period following 2006 leading up to the general financial crisis...

This paper investigates the existence of speculative bubbles in the US national and 21 regional housing markets over three decades (1978-2015). A new method for real-time monitoring exuberance in housing markets is proposed. By taking changes in the macroeconomic conditions (such as interest...

A general procedure is proposed to identify changes in asset return interdependence over time using entropy theory. The approach provides a decomposition of interdependence in terms of comoments including coskewness, cokurtosis and covolatility as well as more traditional measures based on...

We test the predictive accuracy of forecasts of the number of COVID-19 fatalities produced by several forecasting teams and collected by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the first and second waves of the epidemic in the United States. We find three main...

A new test for financial market contagion based on changes in extremal dependence defined as co-kurtosis and co-volatility is developed to identify the propagation mechanism of shocks across international financial markets. The proposed approach captures changes in various aspects of the asset...

In this study, we test whether three popular measures for monetary policy, that is, Romer and Romer (2004), Barakchian and Crowe (2013), and Gertler and Karadi (2015), constitute suitable proxy variables for monetary policy shocks. To this end, we employ different test statistics used in the...

Do illegal drugs foster public corruption? To estimate the causal effect of drugs on public corruption in California, we adopt the synthetic control method and exploit the fact that crack cocaine markets emerged asynchronously across the United States. We focus on California because crack...

The asymptotic distributions of the recursive out-of-sample forecast accuracy test statistics depend on stochastic integrals of Brownian motion when the models under comparison are nested. This often complicates their implementation in practice because the computation of their asymptotic...