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 develop a misspecification test for the multiplicative two-component GARCH-MIDAS model suggested in Engle et al. (2013). In the GARCH-MIDAS model a short-term unit variance GARCH component fluctuates around a smoothly timevarying long-term component which is driven by the dynamics of a...

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...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a large data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

We present a model of multinational firms that predicts that aggregated affiliates' sales fall in distance. The distance effect on foreign affiliate sales is driven by the extensive margin: distance affects the number of affiliates negatively while it has an ambiguous effect on the average...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the benchmark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...