This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill-favoring shifts in the Russian and U.S. economies are driven by the...

Time varying patterns in US growth are analyzed using various univariate model structures, starting from a naive model structure where all features change every period to a model where the slow variation in the conditional mean and changes in the conditional variance are specified together with...

Many economic decisions implicitly or explicitly rely on a projection of the medium- or long-term economic development of a country or region. In this paper, we provide a federal long-run projection model for Germany and the German states. The model features a top-down approach and, as major...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

Although macroeconomic forecasts are a relevant source of information for financial markets, the determinants of their accuracy are still unclear. We examine whether macro forecasting houses' access to private political information is a determinant of macroeconomic forecast accuracy. In...

There is a growing interest in allowing for asymmetry in the density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In multivariate time series, this can be achieved with a copula model, where both serial and cross-sectional dependence is captured by a copula function, and the margins are nonparametric....

We investigate the question whether macroeconomic variables contain information about future stock volatility beyond that contained in past volatility. We show that forecasts of GDP and industrial production growth from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Professional Forecasters predict volatility...

Population ageing constitutes a central challenge to Finland. Understanding the Finnish economy's likely future trajectory and the key sources of growth is important for the design of policies to counteract these adverse long-term trends. For this purpose, we develop a novel long-run forecast...