What happens to demand if a magazine launches a website? This question is empirically analyzed for the German women?s magazine market, a particularly large segment of the German magazine where fierce competition is reigning. Models for differentiated product demand are estimated on panel data...

This paper compares technologies across space and time on the basis of factual and counterfactual substitution elasticities and argues that differences in estimated substitution elasticities should be decomposed into two counterfactual components. While the first component is designed to...

The primary aim of the paper is to place current methodological discussions in macroeconometric modeling contrasting the 'theory first' versus the 'data first' perspectives in the context of a broader methodological framework with a view to constructively appraise them. In particular, the paper...

Two methodological approaches to empirical economics which are labelled 'theory first' versus 'reality first' are introduced building the background for the discussion of the individual contributions to this special issue.

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, wie sich Angebots-, Nachfrage- und geldpolitische Schocks aus den Vereinigten Staaten auf Deutschland übertragen. Dabei wird ein so genanntes factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) auf einen neu zusammengestellten Datensatz mit mehr als 200...

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) estimated on U.S. data in order to analyze monetary transmission via private sector balance sheets, credit risk spreads and asset markets in an integrated setup and to explore the role of monetary policy in the three...

Earlier literature on economic growth models identified Africa specific determinates of economic growth. In standard models of economic growth Africa dummies were significant. A more resent strand of literature attributes the significance of Africa dummies to inappropriate estimation techniques....

This paper systematically studies the use of mixed-frequency data sets and suggests that the use of high frequency data in forecasting economic aggregates can improve forecast accuracy. The best way of using this information is to build a single model, for example, an ARMA model with missing...

We present a model of bilateral real exchange rate determination based on different theories that can be combined into a common statistical framework. Although eclectic, the approach is successfully used to shape a final specification which performs surprisingly well when out of sample exercises...