This paper analyzes the empirical hedonic prices for non-standard condominiums and single family houses using nonparametric estimates as well as a generalized additive model for the spatial generalization of the attractiveness of all Swiss communities. We find that the assumption of...

Networks appear in many fields, from finance to medicine, engineering, biology and social science. They often comprise of a very large number of entities, the nodes, and the interest lies in inferring the interactions between these entities, the edges, from relatively limited data. If the...

Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries' macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the financial reform index developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

Growth regressions are often influenced by extreme observations in the sample. We demonstrate the usefulness of a simple Monte Carlo method as a diagnostic for sample robustness. We apply the technique to a data set used by Mehlum et al. (2006), who show that institutional quality is decisive...

A number of recent studies in the economics literature have focused on the usefulness of factor models in the context of prediction using "big data". In this paper, our over-arching question is whether such "big data" are useful for modelling low frequency macroeconomic variables such as...

Expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm has been used to maximize the likelihood function or posterior when the model contains unobserved latent variables. One main important application of EM algorithm is to find the maximum likelihood estimator for mixture models. In this article, we propose...

A number of recent studies in the economics literature have focused on the usefulness of factor models in the context of prediction using "big data". In this paper, our over-arching question is whether such "big data" are useful for modelling low frequency macroeconomic variables such as...

Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries’ macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the "financial reform index" developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...