The paper argues that when developing an explanatory model of the early-stage entrepreneurial activity level (measured by total index of early entrepreneurial activity - TEA) one should consider the "path dependency" of the "institutional matrix" of different societies. Otherwise one could...

This paper uses sectoral data to study survey-based diffusion indices designed to capture changes in the business cycle in real time. The empirical framework recognizes that when answering survey questions regarding their firm's output, respondents potentially rely on infrequently updated...

The goal of the paper is an evaluation of the performance of manufacturing branches of the Polish economy. Two approaches have been applied. In the first approach data from state statistical reports have been used. Single variables have been combined into the composite indicator, which has...

A factor based approach is often used to build Composite Indicators (CI) from qualitative data stemming from Business and Consumers Survey (BCS). Bruno and Malgarini (2002) and Gayer and Genet (2006) have used factor analysis to synthesize the information contained in the balances of the various...

In recent years, the growing interest of academics and policymakers in governance has been reflected in the proliferation cross-country indices measuring various aspects of governance. In this paper we explain how a simple variant of an unobserved components model can be used to combine the...

This paper surveys some of the major technical issues in the design and construction of real estate research indices, both appraisal-based and transactions-based. The paper considers property sampling issues, differences between transaction prices, market values, and appraised values, the...

This work is part of a project studying the performance of model based estimators in a small area context. We have chosen a simple statistical application in which we estimate the growth rate of occupation for several regions of Spain. We compare three estimators: The direct one based on...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The paper argues that when developing an explanatory model of the early-stage entrepreneurial activity level (measured by total index of early entrepreneurial activity - TEA) one should consider the ‘path dependency' of the ‘institutional matrix' of different societies. Otherwise one could...

A number of popular notions and outright myths on governance and corruption are addressed in this chapter. We distinguish clearly between governance and anti-corruption, while probing the links between both notions. In so doing we challenge the conventional definition of corruption as being too...