This paper analyses revisions of Swiss current account data, taking into account the actual data revision process and the implied types of revisions. In addition we investigate whether the first release of current account data can be improved upon by the use of survey results as gathered by the...

There has been no shortage of theories which purport to explain why globalisation may have, adverse, insignificant or even beneficial effects on income and earnings inequality. Surprisingly, the empirical realities remain an almost complete mystery. In this paper we use data on industrial wage...

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...

Since the mid-nineties, U.S. labor productivity outgrows its European counterpart by a wide margin. Several recent studies have found that this result is brought about by relatively few service industries, where productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S., but not so in Europe. Based on this...

Der Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über die Quellen von Verzerrungen des US-amerikanischen Konsumentenpreisindexes (CPI) nach oben und unten und diskutiert die Massnahmen, die das Bureau of Labor Statistics ergriffen hat, um sie zu beseitigen. Die verbliebenen Verzerrungen werden quantifiziert....

According to KENDRICK (1996, p. 1), National Accounts have become "an indispensable tool for macroeconomic analysis, projections, and policy formulation". The paper elaborates on this statement, addressing policy domains that rely heavily on National Accounts data. Yet - useful as they are -...

We evaluate the usefulness of satellite-based data on nighttime lights for the prediction of annual GDP growth across a global sample of countries. Going beyond traditional measures of luminosity, such as the sum of lights within a country's borders, we propose several innovative distribution-...

This paper considers a formulation of the extended constant or time-varying conditional correlation GARCH model which allows for volatility feedback of either sign, i.e., positive or negative. In the previous literature, negative volatility spillovers were ruled out by the assumption that all...

Macroeconometric policy simulation models allow for an analysis, and, above all, for a quantification of the effects different economic policies have on the various variables that represent the economy. Despite the seminal "Lucas critique" levelled against them, these models are still widely...

Machine Learning models are often considered to be "black boxes" that provide only little room for the incorporation of theory (cf. e.g. Mukherjee, 2017; Veltri, 2017). This article proposes so-called Dynamic Factor Trees (DFT) and Dynamic Factor Forests (DFF) for macroeconomic forecasting, which...