Policymakers, firms, and investors closely monitor traditional survey-based consumer confidence indicators and treat it as an important piece of economic information. We propose a latent factor model for the vector of monthly survey-based consumer confidence and daily sentiment embedded in...

Purpose: This study proposes a new two-stage clustering method to break down the symmetric multiple traveling salesman problem (mTSP) into several single standard traveling salesman problems, each of which can then be solved separately using a heuristic optimization algorithm....

We provide evidence on the least biased ways to identify causal effects in situations where there are multiple outcomes that all depend on the same endogenous regressor and a reasonable but potentially contaminated instrumental variable that is available. Simulations provide suggestive evidence...

We propose a new approach to sample unobserved states conditional on available data in (conditionally) linear unobserved component models when some of the observations are missing. The approach is based on the precision matrix of the states and model variables, which is sparse and banded in many...

We construct a composite index to measure real activity of the Swiss economy on a weekly frequency. The index is based on a novel high-frequency data-set capturing economic activity across distinct dimensions over a long-time horizon. An adequate adjustment of raw data prior to deriving the...

It is well known that the international logistics and supply chains are subject to the domination of seaports and shipping lines each with increasingly significant market power. This implies that international supply chains, which typically involves sea transport as a key chain segment, could be...

This research provides a single explanation for: (i) the persistence of malnutrition and (ii) the increased prevalence of metabolic disease (diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease) among normal weight individuals with economic development. Our model is based on a set point for BMI or...

In this article, we propose a cointegration-based Permanent-Transitory decomposition for nonstationary Dynamic Factor Models. Our methodology exploits the cointegration relations among the observable variables and assumes they are driven by a common and an idiosyncratic component. The common...