The response by regional and national economies to exogenous impulses has a well-established literature in both spatial econometrics and in mainstream econometrics and is of considerable importance given the current economic crisis. This paper focuses on dynamic counterfactual predictions and...

The paper provides probability estimates of the state of the GDP growth. A regime-switching model defines the probability of the Greek GDP being in boom or recession. Then probit models extract the predictive information of a set of explanatory (economic and financial) variables regarding the...

After entering the European Union (EU) Latvia faced new possibilities in international labor market. In 2004 several member states opened their labor markets to workers from Latvia. The largest amount of labor force went to Ireland, Great Britain and Sweden. In these countries salaries were...

For Latvia with incoming into the European Union big opportunities in the international markets have opened. Paper purpose is to investigate influence of international integration processes on development of economy of Latvia. In paper various indicators of a national economy before and after...

Joining the European Union big opportunities in the international markets have opened for Latvia. Paper purpose is to investigate influence of international integration processes on development of economy of Latvia. In the paper Latvian economic indicators before and after entering the EU are...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

The Long-Wave theories of Nikolai Kondratiev and others claim to find mathematic waves in economic and other social data which are at present in dispute. Currently the theory is considered outside the scope of mainstream economics under several rationales. Despite the lack of mainstream...

Joining the European Union big opportunities in the international markets have opened for Latvia. Paper purpose is to investigate influence of international integration processes on development of economy of Latvia. Latvia's incoming in EU increased the amount of received means from structural...

In this paper we suggest the use of an internet job-search indicator (Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample comparison of many forecasting models. With respect to the previous literature we concentrate on the monthly...

This article tests the power of a novel indicator based on job search related web queries in predicting quarterly unemployment rates in short samples. Augmenting standard time series specifications with this indicator definitely improves out-of-sample forecasting performance at nearly all...