Econometric forecasting models typically perform bad in volatile environments as they are often present in economies in transition. Since forecasts of key macroeconomic variable are inevitable as guidelines for economic policy, one might alternatively make attempts at measuring market...

Most European economies will experience significant demographic changes in the decades ahead. Due to low birth rates, populations are shrinking and ageing at the same time. This article explores the impact of demographic change on the banking industry. A unique data set, which contains detailed...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

The lack of internationally comparable capital stock data has been a major obstacle to empirical studies of the contribution of the capital stock to economic growth. In this paper, we provide estimations of aggregate capital stocks for 103 countries in 2010. Depending on data availability the...

Im Jahr 2012 stiegen die Verbraucherpreise in Deutschland um 2,1%. Insgesamt sind die Preise seit der Wiedervereinigung im Durchschnitt um 2,0% und seit der Euro-Einführung sogar nur um 1,6% gestiegen. Abgesehen von wenigen Ausnahmen können sich die Deutschen daher über mangelnde...

This note contains an empirical analysis of the decision of German-speaking business scholars to boycott and opt out of the best known research ranking of business scholars, initiated and published by Germany’s largest business daily, Handelsblatt. Our analysis indicates that scientists who...

Policymakers around the globe have opted for high levels of regulation of the market for vehicle safety and declared many vehicle safety systems as mandatory for new cars. In this paper we argue that the delivered justifications for these policies are at least questionable. We add a completely...

Almost all attempts to construct capital stock data base on some variant of the Perpetual Inventory Method. While various countries employ this method to construct suitable proxies of national capital stocks, the implementation and the underlying assumptions differ considerably, thereby...