Previous assessments of nominal exchange rate determination, following Meese and Rogoff (1983) have focused upon a narrow set of models. Cheung et al. (2005) augmented the usual suspects with productivity based models, and "behavioral equilibrium exchange rate" models, and assessed performance...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

This paper addresses the question of whether nominal Eurocurrency interest rates provide significant information about expected inflation. To test this question two sets of inflation forecasts for the U.S. and five European countries were generated: 1) from time series of past inflation rates;2)...

Using newly-constructed spatially-disaggregated data for London from 1801-1921, we show that the invention of the steam railway led to the first large-scale separation of workplace and residence. We show that a class of quantitative urban models is remarkably successful in explaining this...

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL). We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the international airport in Sierra Leone (which is separated from the...

Airplanes are a fast but expensive means of shipping goods, a fact which has implications for comparative advantage. The paper develops a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods which vary by weight and hence transport cost. Comparative advantage depends on relative air and surface transport...

This paper posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with persons of the same race. If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbors of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighborhood social capital connections, and the more likely he is to...

We have seen in the past decade a sharp increase in the extent that companies use data to optimize their businesses. Variously called the `Big Data' or `Data Science' revolution, this has been characterized by massive amounts of data, including unstructured and nontraditional data like text and...

Can algorithms assist firms in their decisions on nominating corporate directors? We construct algorithms to make out-of-sample predictions of director performance. Tests of the quality of these predictions show that directors predicted to do poorly indeed do poorly compared to a realistic pool...