Seasonally adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) data are inevitably surrounded by uncertainty. Disregarding methodological improvements, two main sources of revisions can be distinguished: First, revisions that reflect the incorporation of more comprehensive or more representative, but...

Normality testing is an evergreen topic in statistics and econometrics and other disciplines. The paper focuses on testing economic time series for normality in a robust way, taking specific data features such as serial dependence and time-varying volatility into account. Here, we suggest tests...

This paper aims to provide reliable estimates for the COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, From observable data on confirmed, recovered, and deceased cases, a noisy measurement for the contact rate can be constructed, To filter out measurement errors and...

We propose a monitoring procedure to detect a structural change from stationary to integrated behavior. When the procedure is applied to the errors of a relationship between integrated series it thus monitors a structural change from a cointegrating relationship to a spurious regression. The...

In this paper we examine if Slovak retail gasoline and diesel prices respond more quickly when crude oil price rises rather than when it decreases. The error correction model with irreversible behaviour of explanatory variables is considered to be basic tool for the analysis of asymmetric retail...

The overestimation of willingness-to-pay (WTP) in hypothetical responses is a well-known finding in the literature. Various techniques have been proposed to remove or, at least, reduce this bias. Using about 30,000 responses on WTP for a variety of power mixes from a panel of 6,500 German...

Stylized facts show that migrants more often face overqualified employment than natives. As shown by previous research, one third of the employed foreign born with tertiary education in the EU-15 are overqualified, with levels reaching up to 57.6%, compared to 20.9% among natives. Among the...

The classical Heckman (1976, 1979) selection correction estimator (heckit) is misspecified and inconsistent if an interaction of the outcome variable and an explanatory variable matters for selection. To address this specification problem, a full information maximum likelihood estimator and a...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...

In federal countries, such as the U.S., the fiscal authority consists not of one, but many governments, with state governments accounting for a sizable share of expenditures. We analyze how state partisanship of politicians affects state fiscal policy and quantify the possible macroeconomic...