This paper is a first attempt to study the size and development of the shadow economies of 157 countries over 1999 to 2013. Using a MIMIC model, we find that higher tax and regulatory burden, unemployment and self-employment rates are drivers of the shadow economy, meaning that an increase of...

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...

The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

This article assesses two secondary data compilations about income inequality – the World Income Inequality Database (WIIDv2c), and the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIIDv4.0) which is based on WIID but with all observations multiply-imputed. WIID and SWIID are convenient and...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selectionbiases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by thequestionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactiveexperiments and representative...

Based on the hypothesis that microdata are of crucial importance for internationally competitiveeconomic research and scientific advice in economic and social policy, the authorsdevelop various proposals for an improved data supply for empirical work in Germany. Present shortcomings are mainly...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the curse of dimensionality in thecase of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VARare proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends toinfinity...

This survey is devoted to the statistical analysis of duration models and point processes. Thefirst section introduces specific concepts and definitions for single-spell duration models.Section two is devoted to the presentation of conditional duration models which incorporatethe effects of...

This paper considers a multivariate t version of the Gaussian dynamic conditional correlation(DCC) model proposed by Engle (2002), and suggests the use of devolatized returnscomputed as returns standardized by realized volatilities rather than by GARCH type volatilityestimates. The t-DCC...