The availability of copious amounts of data produced by the increasing datification of our society is nowadays deemed an opportunity to produce timely and convenient statistical information. This paper shows the building of economic sentiment indexes from the texts of the most read economic...

The purpose of this paper is to construct a relative performance index for the States in India in terms of their performance in combatting Covid-19 pandemic. The data is analyzed up to August, 2020, though the methodology used can be readily extended to update the index. The methodology can be...

We empirically analyze the effect of UN and US economic sanctions on life expectancy and its gender gap in target countries. Our sample covers 98 less developed and newly industrialized countries over the period 1977-2012. We employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of...

This paper is concerned with ex ante and ex post counterfactual analyses in the case of macroeconometric applications where a single unit is observed before and after a given policy intervention. It distinguishes between cases where the policy change affects the model's parameters and where it...

As long as it is employed cautiously enough, the model approach is a useful tool to estimate simultaneously the size and the development of the shadow economy in several countries. However, a second method is necessary to calibrate the model. The currency demand approach can lead to highly...

Most equivalence scales which are applied in research on poverty and inequality do not depend on income, although there is strong empirical evidence that equivalence scales in fact are income dependent. This paper explores the consistency of results derived from income independent and income...

To accurately predict behavior economists need reliable measures of individual time preferences and attitudes toward risk and typically need to assume stability of these characteristics over time and across decision domains. We test the reliability of two choice tasks for eliciting discount...

We examine the largest cost component in offshore development projects, drilling rates, which have been high in recent years. To our knowledge, rig rates have not been analysed empirically before in the economic literature. Using econometric analysis, we examine the effects of gas and oil...

This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

Empirically analyzing household behavior usually relies on informal data preprocessing. That is, before an econometric model is estimated, observations are selected in such a way that the resulting subset of data can be assumed to be sufficiently homogeneous with respect to the specific research...