Out-of-sample employment forecasts for 33 U.S. industries which are likely to be sensitive to the federal minimum wage are, more often than not, more accurate when information about the minimum wage is not taken into account. This is true even in instances where this information improves wage...

This paper analyzes how agency problems in nancial contracting determine risk-taking andinvestment. In perfect capital markets a risk-neutral rm would invest until the expectedmarginal return equals the interest rate. However, as rms with little net-worth face agencycost in nancial contracting...

One-year-ahead forecasts by the OECD and by national institutes of GDP growth and inflation in 13 European countries are analysed. RMSE was large: 1.9 % for growth and 1.6 % for inflation. Six (11) OECD and 10 (7) institute growth forecast records were significantly better than an average growth...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government’s finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...

This paper develops a Bayesian vector autoregressive model(BVAR) for the leader of the Portuguese car market to forecast the market share. The model includes five marketing decision variables.The Bayesian prior is selected on the basis of the accuracy of the out-of-sample forecasts. We find that...

Until recently the Economic Research Centre (ERC) panel at the University of Western Australia published forecasts of future gold prices in The West Australian newspaper. This note assesses the accuracy of these forecasts. The results show that the actual gold price series follows a simple...

This paper provides forecasts derived from Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) models for the output growth, inflation and balance of payments of the G-5 and G-7 countries. These forecasts are compared with those derived from alternative time series models and with those provided by the...

Eine große Herausforderung der multivariablen Analyse mit bilanziellen Kennzahlen besteht in der Identifikation derjenigen Kennzahlen, die zur besten Modellperformance führen und dabei möglichst leicht interpretierbar und intuitiv bleiben. Die Menge der in Frage kommenden Kennzahlen ist in...

We use a dynamic factor model proposed by Stock and Watson [1998, 1999, 2002a,b] to forecast Colombian inflation. The model includes 92 monthly series observed over the period 1999:01-2008:06. The results show that for short-run horizons, factor model forecasts significantly outperformed the...