This study addresses price convergence in two cities in Turkey (Istanbul and Ankara) using the annual data over the three quarters of the 20th century (1922–1998), characterized by prevailing high inflation rates for most of the period. In contrast to the rest of the literature addressing...

We investigate whether the KOF Barometer–a leading indicator regularly released by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute–can be useful for short-term out-of-sample prediction of year-on-year quarterly real GDP growth rates in Switzerland. We find that the KOF Barometer appears to be useful for...

In the aftermath of the euro cash changeover consumers’ inflation perceptions rose substantially in the euro area countries while actual inflation figures remained almost unchanged. During that period media reporting on the potentially large inflationary effect of the euro introduction...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

Based on annual data for growth and inflation forecasts for Germany covering the time span from 1970 to 2007 and up to 17 different forecasts per year, we test for a possible asymmetry of the forecasters' loss function and estimate the degree of asymmetry for each forecasting institution using...

In this paper, we investigate whether the Google search activity can help in nowcasting the year-on-year growth rates of monthly US private consumption using a real-time data set. The Google-based forecasts are compared to those based on a benchmark AR(1) model and the models including the...

This paper investigates the income convergence among Russian regions in the period 1998- 2006. It makes two major contributions to rather extensive literature on the regional con- vergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the...

This study analyzes the stability of the distance coefficient values over time in the generalized gravity equation of Bergstrand (1989) using both aggregate and disaggregated trade flows among 22 OECD countries recorded for the sample period covering 1970 until 2000. We estimate the gravity...