We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

In this paper, we test whether oil price predicts economic growth for 28 developed and 17 developing countries. We use predictability tests that account for the key features of the data, namely, persistency, endogeneity, and heteroskedasticity. Our analysis considers a large number of countries,...

We analyse the Generalised Hyperbolic distribution as a model for fat tails and asymmetries in multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models. We provide a standardised version of this distribution, obtain analytical expressions for the log-likelihood score, and explain how...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

Employing the MS-ARJI-GJR-GARCH-X model, in which the parameters for the jump process, the asymmetric GARCH effect and the impacts of oil price shocks are regime-dependent, this paper analyzes the impact of crude oil price shock on stock return dynamics. Empirical results reveal three...

We look into the available macroeconomic figures and the predictions made about the recession in Greece by international organizations, Greek research centers, and the Greek government; and suggest that the predictions regarding the decline in real GDP in recent years were overly optimistic. The...

In this comprehensive empirical study we critically evaluate the use of forecast averaging in the context of electricity prices. We apply seven averaging and one selection scheme and perform a backtesting analysis on day-ahead electricity prices in three major European and US markets. Our...

How big a boost to long run growth can countries expect from the ICT revolution? I use the results of growth accounting and the insights from a two-sector growth model to answer this question. The use of a two-sector rather than a one-sector model is required because of the very rapid rate at...

This paper uses a model of growth and imperfect capital mobility across multiple economies to characterize the dynamics of (cross-country) in- come distributions. This allows convenient study of the convergence hypothesis, and reveals, where appropriate, polarization and clumping within...

This paper studies cross-country patterns of economic growth from the viewpoint of income distribution dynamics. Such a perspective raises new empirical and theoretical issues in growth analysis: the profound empirical regularity is an \emerging twin peaks" in the cross-sectional distribution,...