Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) continue to be an important source of timely information on business cycles in many countries. We address quality of economic survey data by uncovering the relation between unit non-response and participant characteristics on company respectively respondent level....

We compare forecasts from different adaptive learning algorithms and calibrations applied to US real-time data on inflation and growth. We find that the Least Squares with constant gains adjusted to match (past) survey forecasts provides the best overall performance both in terms of forecasting...

Hospitals are making big investments in various types of ICT, so it is important to investigate their effects on innovation and performance. In this paper is presented an empirical study in this direction, based on data for 743 hospitals from 18 European countries, which were collected in the...

The main objective of this empirical paper is to identify characteristics of imitation and innovation and shed light on possible differences between these two kinds of innovative activity. Thus, it tries to answer the following questions: (a) what are the determinants of imitative performance...

Okun’s Law postulates a stable relationship between quarterly output growth and changes in (un)employment. This proposition has so far been tested with macroeconomic data at the highest level of aggregation. The paper goes beyond that in extending the analysis to industry data from...

We estimate demand, supply, monetary, investment and financial shocks in a VAR identified with a minimum set of sign restrictions on US data. We find that financial shocks are major drivers of fluctuations in output, stock prices and investment but have a limited effect on inflation. In a second...

Relying on a large sample of countries, this paper quantifies the effect of political constraints, as measured by legislative control by the incumbent government, on the size of fiscal stimulus packages that have been put in place as reaction to the Great Recession. The results suggest that on...

This paper investigates the R&D persistence of R&D active firms in different markets with different intensities of competition, based on firm-level panel data for the period 1996-2008. In a dynamic setting of the empirical model it turns out that persistence is strongly related to market...

Based on a comprehensive data set comprising 13 countries, 22 industries and a period of 30 years we investigate the impact of internal and external knowledge pools of both green and ‘other than green’ technologies on green patent activities. It turned out that the internal green knowledge...

This paper is the first to study the factors determining labor’s share of income on the level of the individual firm, employing an unusually informative panel data set. The empirical examination is concerned with Switzerland which stands out as one of the very few developed countries with a...