We investigate the potential for statistical forecasting of aggregate oil and gas investment on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). A unique and detailed dataset containing data from 109 different fields on the NCS between 1970 and 2015 was employed. A set of 1080 autoregressive distributed...

Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis' impact on GDP. Impulse Response Functions (IRF) estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that the effects of earlier crises were long-lasting. We show that standard estimates of IRFs are highly sensitive to...

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and instantaneous available source of leading indicators, the ifo World Economic Survey (WES), to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries...

Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

We employ a new macro-epidemiological agent based model to evaluate the “lives vs livelihoods” trade-off brought to the fore by Covid-19. The disease spreads across the networks of agents’ social and economic contacts and feeds back on the economic dimension of the model through various...

We employ a new version of the ABC macro-epidemiological agent based model presented in Delli Gatti and Reissl (2020) to evaluate the effects of vaccinations and variants on the epidemic and macroeconomic outlook. Vaccination plays the role of a mitigating factor, reducing the frequency and the...

In this paper, we study the predictive power of electricity consumption data for regional economic activity. Using unique weekly and monthly electricity consumption data for the second-largest German state, the Free State of Bavaria, we conduct a pseudo out-of-sample forecasting experiment for...

We show that updates to macroeconomic expectations among professional forecasters exhibit an offsetting pattern where increases in current-quarter predictions lead to decreases in three quarter ahead predictions. We further document evidence of individual overreaction at the quarterly frequency...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...