The geographical pattern of consumers’ expenditures, whether made on-site or online, has implications for the location of economic activity and regional economic development. Data limitations have however limited our knowledge of this aspect of consumer behaviour. This paper uses transaction...

For stationary transformations of variables, there exists a maximum horizon beyond which forecasts can provide no more information about the variable than is present in the unconditional mean. Meteorological forecasts, typically excepting only experimental or exploratory situations, are not...

Since the advent of standard national accounts data over 60 years ago, economists have traditionally relied on monthly or quarterly data supplied by central statistical agencies for macroeconomic modelling and forecasting. However, technological advances of the past several years have resulted...

Statistical methods are widely used for valuation (prediction of the value at sale or auction) of a unique object such as a work of art. The usual approach is estimation of a hedonic model for objects of a given class, such as paintings from a particular school or period, or in the context of...

We assess the usefulness of a large set of electronic payments data comprising debit and credit card transactions, as well as cheques that clear through the banking system, as potential indicators of current GDP growth. These variables capture a broad range of spending activity and are available...

Different causal mechanisms have been proposed to link commodity prices and exchange rates, with opposing implications. We examine these causal relationships empirically, using data on three commodities (crude oil, gold, copper) and four countries (Canada, Australia, Norway, Chile), over the...

This paper proposes a new class of asymmetric Student-t (AST) distributions, and investigates its properties, gives procedures for estimation, and indicates applications in financial econometrics. We derive analytical expressions for the cdf, quantile function, moments, and quantities useful in...

This paper investigates a number of general phenomena connected with consumer behaviour in response to a severe economic shock, using billions of French card transactions measured before and during the COVID-19 epidemic. We examine changes in consumer mobility, anticipatory behaviour in response...