Empirical researchers studying party systems often struggle with the question of how to count parties. Indexes of party system fragmentation used to address this problem (e.g., the effective number of parties) have a fundamental shortcoming: since the same index value may represent very...

“Moore's Law” in the semiconductor manufacturing industry is used to describe the predictable historical evolution of a single manufacturing technology platform that has been continuously reducing the costs of fabricating electronic circuits since the mid-1960s. Some features of its future...

We develop EIRE Mod (Elementary Irish Real Economy Model), a core DSGE model suitable for policy analysis in Ireland. The model's underlying structure, with a distinction between the traded and non-traded sectors and an import content of exports component, is designed to replicate the highly...

Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors. These errors make it impossible to find the correct match with certainty. In the first part of the paper, we suggest a fully...

Exponential smooth transition autoregressive (ESTAR) models are widely used in theinternational finance literature, particularly for the modelling of real exchange rates. Weshow that the exponential function is ill-suited as a regime weighting function because oftwo undesirable properties....

In contrast to conventional model selection criteria, the Focused Information Criterion (FIC) allows for the purpose-specific choice of model specifications. This accommodates the idea that one kind of model might be highly appropriate for inferences on a particular focus parameter, but not for...