We provide key insights on expectation formation based on the Bloomberg economic survey: around two thirds of professional forecasters provide GDP forecasts that are temporally consistent, meaning that quarterly forecasts add up to the annual. Temporally consistent forecasts are not more...

Survey forecasts are prone to entry and exit of forecasters as well as forecasters not contributing every period leading to gaps. These gaps make it difficult to compare individual forecasters to each other and raises the question of how to deal with the missing observations. This is addressed...

This paper presents a new explanation for the sustained pattern of international net capital flows by modifying the standard consumption capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) to create net capital flows beyond the initial period. In addition to the well established link between asset returns and...

This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

Does it pay off in terms of citations to issue an article as a working paper before it is published in a refereed journal? We show empirically that the answer is yes, using 3167 articles published in five of the top journals in economics between 2000 and 2010. The effect is an around 25% higher...

This study documents how the demographics of new infections and mortality changed over time across US counties. We find that counties with a larger population share aged above 60 were hit harder initially in terms of both cases and mortality in March and April while counties with a larger...

Many papers in economics that are published in peer reviewed journals are initially released in widely circulated working paper series. This raises the question about the benefit of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal in terms of citations. Specifically, we address the question: To what extent...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

We compare Covid-related working papers in economics to non-Covid-related working papers in four dimensions. Based on five well-known working papers series and data from the RePEc website, we find that Covid papers are mainly cover topics in macroeconomics and health, they are written by larger...