Accurate regional estimates of output are desired as an indicator of level of development and as a variable used to explain internal migration, demand patterns, fertility and other aspects of behaviour. This chapter explores one often neglected aspect of regional income differences, namely that...

This paper surveys existing factor forecast applications for real economic activity and inflation by means of a meta-analysis and contributes to the current debate on the determinants of the forecast performance of large-scale dynamic factor models relative to other models. We find that, on...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...

This paper uses a meta-analysis to survey existing factor forecast applications for output and inflation and assesses what causes large factor models to perform better or more poorly at forecasting than other models. Our results suggest that factor models tend to outperform small models, whereas...

I explore the relationship between economic growth and international labor standards in a panel of 121 countries from 1974 to 2004. A large literature has empirically tested the neoclassical growth model using cross-sectional or panel regressions. Here, I augment the growth model with labor...

I explore the link between openness to trade, investments in human capital and technology, credit market constraints, and child labor in a panel of 101 countries from 1980 to 2004. In a cross-country setting, Neumayer and De Soysa (2005) and Edmonds and Pavcnik (2006) find that countries that...

Traditional autocorrelation and variance ratio tests are based on serial uncorrelatedness rather than martingale difference. As such, they do not capture potential nonlinearity-in-mean, which could lead to misleading inferences in favor of the martingale hypothesis. This paper employs various...

We apply a jump GARCH model to daily returns of the ten largest international securitized real estate markets and investigate the sources of large price changes. We document, for the first time, evidence for jump dynamics across major international securitized real estate markets. Large price...

This paper presents an innovative approach to extracting factors which are shown to predict the VIX, the S&P 500 Realized Volatility and the Variance Risk Premium. The approach is innovative along two different dimensions, namely: (1) we extract factors from panels of filtered volatilities - in...