Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

Using a new survey of firms' inflation expectations in France, we provide novel evidence about the measurement and formation of inflation expectations on the part of firms. First, French firms report inflation expectations with a smaller, but still positive, bias than households and display less...

Unemployment is notoriously difficult to predict. In previous studies, once country and year fixed effects are added to panel estimates, few variables predict changes in unemployment rates. Using panel data for 29 European countries collected by the European Commission over 444 months between...

We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed same-sex twins in Denmark. Our second contribution is the use of administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our...

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect on subjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types of benchmarks. Dynamic comparisons outweigh static ones. Internal benchmarks are more important than external reference...

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey purposely designed and conducted to answer this research question. We analyze the case of Cape Verde, a country with allegedly the highest 'brain drain' in Africa, despite a...

In this paper the differences in the incidence of pay for performance plans between occupations in a sample of Spanish manufacturing establishments are analyzed. Our results show that there are significant differences between occupations in the incidence of individual, group and firm or plant...