The tremendous advances that have been made in information and communication technology have led to a concomitant increase in the production and accumulation of big data in various sectors. And as big data has grown, governments, private enterprise and academia are coming paying it more and more...

The eradication of poverty, which was the first of the millennium development goals (MDG) established by the United Nations and followed by the sustainable development goals (SDG), requires knowing where the poor are located. Traditionally, household surveys are considered the best source of...

We present a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections. We then provide a forecast evaluation for GDP growth and CPI inflation since 1982: we compare the staff forecasts with those from commonly used time-series models estimated with...

We propose a functional principal components method that accounts for stratified random sample weighting and time dependence in the observations to understand the evolution of distributions of monthly micro-level consumer prices for the United Kingdom (UK). We apply the method to publicly...

This paper proposes a new bootstrap procedure for mean squared errors of robust smallarea estimators. We formally prove the asymptotic validity of the proposed bootstrap method and examine its finite sample performance through Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that our procedure performs...

This paper relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) assumption commonly imposed in empirical discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming that players have unbiased/correct expectations, my model treats a player's belief about the behavior of other players as an...

This paper studies short-term forecasting of Canadian real GDP and its expenditure components using combinations of nowcasts from different models. Starting with a medium-sized data set, we use a suite of common nowcasting tools for quarterly real GDP and its expenditure components. Using a...

Given the influence that agents' expectations have on key macroeconomic variables, it is surprising that very few papers have tried to extrapolate agents' "true" expectations directly from the data. This paper presents one such approach, starting with the hypothesis that there is sluggishness in...