A growing literature documents the existence of strategic political reactions to public expenditure in one jurisdiction on either neighboring or reference jurisdictions. The latter might give raise to downward expenditure spiral, or "race to the bottom". However, in ascertaining the empirical...

In 1982, the Journal of Forecasting published the results of a forecasting competition organized by Spyros Makridakis (Makridakis et al., 1982). In this, the ex ante forecast errors of 21 methods were compared for forecasts of a variety of economic time series, generally using 1001 time series....

The M3-Competition continues to improve the design of forecasting competitions: It examines more series than any previous competition, improves error analyses and includes commercial forecasting programs as competitors. To judge where to go from here, I step back to look at the M-Competitions as...