This paper describes the components of the EICIE, the Econometric Institute Current Indicator of the Economy. This measure concerns quarterly and annual growth of Dutch real Gross Domestic Product. The key component of our real-time forecasting model for Dutch quarterly GDP is weekly staffing...

Econometric models for economic time series may include harmonic regressors to describe cyclical patterns in the data. This paper focuses on the possibility that the cycle periods in these regressors change over time. To this end, a smooth regime-switching harmonic regression is proposed, and a...

We analyze the behavior of experts who quote forecasts for monthlySKU-level sales data where we compare data before and after the momentthat experts received different kinds of feedback on their behavior. Wehave data for 21 experts located in as many countries who make SKUlevelforecasts for a...

In this paper we examine two hypotheses concerning emigration. The first hypothesis is that emigration is positively correlated with wage differentials. The second hypothesis concerns a positive correlation between emigration and higher education in the sending country (the so-called brain gain...

Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts.Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on threequestions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts andmodel forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

This paper deals with the analysis and evaluation of sales forecasts of managers, given that it is unknown how they constructed their forecasts. Our goal is to find out whether these forecasts are rational. To examine deviations from rationality, we argue that one has to approximate how the...

The lack of trust in the maritime industry between all the industry organizations and regulators has created an inspection industry which is heavily controlled by oil majors in order to limit their liability. This report is an introductory part of a PhD project called "The Econometrics of...

We propose a discussion index model (Stock and Watson, 2002) to fore- cast electricity demand for one hour to one week ahead. The model is particularly useful as it captures complicated seasonal patterns in the data. The forecast performance of the proposed method is illustrated with a simulated...

We analyze five vintages of eighteen quarterly macroeconomic variables for the Netherlands and we focus on the degree of deterministic seasonality in these series. We document that the data show most such deterministic seasonality for their first release vintage and for the last available...

This paper reports on simulation results for the Wald test for ï¡1=ï¡2=0 in the regression model for the case ï« is known and for the case where ï« has to be estimated using nonlinear least squares (NLS). This last situation is not standard, and we therefore provide critical values for...