Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level and, therefore, require regional forecasts. The data available to compute regional forecasts are usually a pseudo panel of a limited number of observations over time and a large...

This article analyzes artificial neural networks (ANNs) as a method to compute employment forecasts at a regional level. The empirical application is based on employment data collected for 327West German regionsover a periodof fourteenyears. First, the authors compare ANNs to models commonly...