This article tests the power of a novel indicator based on job search related web queries in predicting quarterly unemployment rates in short samples. Augmenting standard time series specifications with this indicator definitely improves out-of-sample forecasting performance at nearly all...

Trend estimation deals with the characterization of the underlying, or long–run, evolution of a time series. Despite being a very pervasive theme in time series analysis since its inception, it still raises a lot of controversies. The difficulties, or better, the challenges, lie in the...

A key parameter that determines the distributional impacts of a policy shift in general equilibrium models is the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. Despite the importance of this parameter in applied modeling, its identification continues to pose a challenge. Given the...

This constant-market-shares (CMS) analysis shows the development of competitiveness, market and product structure of the Austrian merchandise exports from 1990 to 2006. The traditional CMS application was transformed to a dynamic model, such that the static indicators have been replaced by time...

In this document, we investigate the evolution of the income elasticity and the price elasticity of the demand for gasoline over the period 1975-2006. By using the Probabilistic Reduction Approach, we were able to model changes in mean heterogeneity and variance heterogeneity directly into the...

This paper examines whether the predictability of securitized real estate returns differs from that of stock returns. It also provides a cross-country comparison of securitized real estate return predictability. In contrast to most of the literature on this issue, the analysis is not based on a...

Statistical data sets often contain observations that differ markedly from the bulk of the data. These outlying observations, ‘outliers’, have given rise to notable risks for statistical analysis and inference. Unfortunately, many of the classical statistical methods, such as ordinary least...

We search for evidence against the hypothesis of a non-linear relationship between inflation and growth rates for 1993-2012 Peruvian data. A family of dichotomous models provide the way to model the relationship between the those two variables' cycles. Given the acceleration/de-acceleration...

In a recent paper Leong-Huang:2010 {Journal of Applied Statistics 37, 215Ӳ33} proposed a wavelet-correlation-based approach to test for cointegration between two time series. However, correlation and cointegration are two different concepts even when wavelet analysis is used. It is known that...

This paper examines the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy for some former transition, emerging European economies over the 1995Q1–2010Q4 period by using a Markov regime-switching model. We consider the monetary policy rule proposed by Taylor (1993) and the fiscal policy rule...