Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter ('nowcasts' and 'forecasts' respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on...

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the development in income distribution and outlines its major long-term trends of 23 countries worldwide. These countries are clustered in four groups covering the core advanced, the Nordic, the emerging, and the least developed economies of the...