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...

In a recent paper, Bai and Perron (1998) considered theoretical issues related to the limiting distribution of estimators and test statistics in the linear model with multiple structural changes. In this companion paper, we consider practical issues for the empirical applications of the...

The paper addresses a topical issue – how expansionary fiscal policy affects the debt to GDP ratio. It examines whether the projected future economic growth (stimulated by government spending) is sustained with the resulting national debt. It is discussedif government investment in...

Genetic algorithms were the first evolutionary algorithm designed. These algorithms simulate natural selection to produce good solutions quickly for complex problems. Job shop scheduling with sequence dependent setup times is an NP-hard problem – any algorithm to optimize this problem has...

The macroeconomic indicators concern both the flows that are not fully or partially compensated over a time interval, which can be cumulated or integrated, and the stocks or funds identified in a particular moment. These indicators are addressed either as free real and nominal indicators, or as...

Las principales estadísticas oficiales con las que contamos los mexicanos para evaluar el desempeño económico de nuestro país, y el éxito o fracaso de las políticas económicas instrumentadas, contienen errores y sesgos de medición. El meollo está en que, medir correctamente la...

Whether or not macroeconomics is a science depends on the scientific nature of macroeconomic theories and how the discipline responds when the empirical evidence fails to match the underlying assumptions and predictions of the theories. By way of an example, four conditions for macroeconomics to...

Acronyms for groups of countries provide an often useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities, and terms such as PIIGS, BRICs and LDCs pervade the lexicon of international and comparative political economy. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these...

In the past 30 years, the historiography of colonial Pampean agriculture showed a radical change. The “Bonaerense Campaign”, which was thought extensively devoted to cattle, was recently named one of the most important grain-producing regions of the Spanish Empire. This new hermeneutics of...

The individual consumer of alcohol, often the household head, loses part of his income to buy alcohol. Excessive consumption of alcohol causes social costs (support costs of illness, family trauma, car accident, job loss and productivity etc.). Its effects on the health of the individual drinker...