Preise, Einkommen, und Nachfrage - die zentralen zu erklaerenden Variablen in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften sind objektiv messbar. Daneben gibt es jedoch zwei nicht minder zentrale Groessen, Erwartungen und Praeferenzen, die sich einer direkten objektiven Messung entziehen. Es sind subjektive...

The work of Levine and Renelt (1992) and Sala-i-Martin (1997a, b) which attempted to test the robustness of various determinants of growth rates of per capita GDP among countries using two variants of Edward Leamerâ??s extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment...

We analyze the United Nations commodities trade database (UN comtrade), comprised of international commodities exchanges in volume and price with monthly resolution. We introduce a trade impact index to quantify the impact, in terms of distance travelled, of importing a specific food raw...

Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policymakers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

There is a robust literature documenting the importance of physician practice style (e.g., the propensity to perform certain operations) in explaining outcomes related to patients' physical health. Yet little is known about the role of physicians in explaining patients' mental health outcomes....

In modelling macroeconomic time series, often a monthly indicator of global real economic activity is used. We propose a new indicator, named World steel production, and compare it to other existing indicators, precisely the Kilian's index of global real economic activity and the index of OECD...

We decompose the textual data in a daily Norwegian business newspaper into news topics and investigate their predictive and causal role for asset prices. Our three main findings are: (1) a one unit innovation in the news topics predict roughly a 1 percentage point increase in close-to-open...