We propose a fast approximate Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for large data sets embedded in a design based approach. Here, the loglikelihood ratios involved in the Metropolis-Hastings acceptance step are considered as data. The building block is one single subsample from the complete data set,...

Regional banks as savings and cooperative banks are widespread in continental Europe. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, however, they had problems keeping their profitability which is an important quantitative indicator for the health of a bank and the banking sector overall. We use a...

While the actions of economists and politicians can be influenced by facts, statistics or empirical predictions, narratives are becoming an increasingly important factor for the decision making in the field of economics and politics. Evaluating such narratives not at selective points in time but...

Identifying narratives in texts is a challenging task, as not only narrative elements such as the factors and events have to be identified but their semantic relation has to be explained as well. Despite this complexity, an effective technique to extract narratives from texts can have a great...

The prompt availability of information on the current state of the economy in real-time is required for prediction purposes and crucial for timely policy adjustment and economic decision-making. While important macroeconomic indicators are reported only quarterly and also published with...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the introduction of a Writing Center at a university. The center has the purpose to provide subject-specific courses that aim to improve students' abilities of scientific writing. In order to deal with presumed selfperceptional biases of students in...

This paper uses concurrently and - for the first time - retrospectively reported life satisfaction from the 1984 to 1987 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the importance of different comparison standards for the empirical correlation of unemployment and subjective life...

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is a rotational panel provided by Eurostat that covers important variables over all EU Member States. Unfortunately, Eurostat provides separate data sets which do not cover all waves. Furthermore, information on monthly...

This paper develops a decomposition algorithm by which a market economy with many households may be solved through the computation of equilibria for a sequence of representative agent economies. The paper examines local and global convergence properties of the sequential recalibration (SR)...