Empirical assessments of the forecasting power of spatial panel data econometric models are still scarcely available. Moreover, several methodological contributions rely on simulated data to showcase the potential of proposed methods. While simulations may be useful to evaluate the properties of...

Contrary to the number of unemployed or vacancies, the number of employees subject to social security contribu-tions (SSC) for Germany is published after a time lag of 2 months. Furthermore, there is a waiting period of 6 months until the values are not revised any more. This paper uses monthly...

The economic crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in recent history. We contribute to a growing literature investigating the economic consequences of covid-19 by showing how unemployment-related online searches across the EU27 reacted to the introduction of lock-downs. We...

This study aims to refine unemployment forecasts by incorporating the degree of consensus in consumers’ expectations. With this objective, we first model the unemployment rate in eight European countries using the step-wise algorithm proposed by Hyndman and Khandakar (J Stat Softw...

In any economic analysis, regions or municipalities should not be regarded as isolated spatial units, but rather as highly interrelated small open economies. These spatial interrelations must be considered also when the aim is to forecast economic variables. For example, policy makers need...

We show that Google search activity on relevant terms is a strong out-of-sample predictor for future employment growth in the US over the period 2004-2019 at both short and long horizons. Starting from an initial search term ''jobs'', we construct a large panel of 172 variables using Google's...

The Article Studies The Predictive Capabilities Of Qualitative Assessments Of Employment Expectations Obtained From Business Tendency Observations Of Entrepreneurial Activity, Which Are Currently A Widespread Source Of Economic Information Both In National And International Practice. The Study...

We propose a generic workflow for the use of machine learning models to inform decision making and to communicate modelling results with stakeholders. It involves three steps: (1) a comparative model evaluation, (2) a feature importance analysis and (3) statistical inference based on Shapley...

Euro area labour market variables are published with a considerable lag, longer than in the case of real GDP. We develop a suite of models to provide a more timely estimate (nowcast) of euro area quarterly employment growth based on a broad range of monthly indicators. The suite includes a batch...

Euro area labour market variables are published with a considerable lag, longer than in the case of real GDP. We develop a suite of models to provide a more timely estimate (nowcast) of euro area quarterly employment growth based on a broad range of monthly indicators. The suite includes a batch...