The asymptotic distributions of the recursive out-of-sample forecast accuracy test statistics depend on stochastic integrals of Brownian motion when the models under comparison are nested. This often complicates their implementation in practice because the computation of their asymptotic...

Do illegal drugs foster public corruption? To estimate the causal effect of drugs on public corruption in California, we adopt the synthetic control method and exploit the fact that crack cocaine markets emerged asynchronously across the United States. We focus on California because crack...

This paper investigates the existence of speculative bubbles in the US national and 21 regional housing markets over three decades (1978-2015). A new method for real-time monitoring exuberance in housing markets is proposed. By taking changes in the macroeconomic conditions (such as interest...

We test the predictive accuracy of forecasts of the number of COVID-19 fatalities produced by several forecasting teams and collected by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the first and second waves of the epidemic in the United States. We find three main...

Housing fever is a popular term to describe an overheated housing market or housing price bubble. Like other financial asset bubbles, housing fever can inflict harm on the real economy, as indeed the US housing bubble did in the period following 2006 leading up to the general financial crisis...

A general procedure is proposed to identify changes in asset return interdependence over time using entropy theory. The approach provides a decomposition of interdependence in terms of comoments including coskewness, cokurtosis and covolatility as well as more traditional measures based on...

A new test for financial market contagion based on changes in extremal dependence defined as co-kurtosis and co-volatility is developed to identify the propagation mechanism of shocks across international financial markets. The proposed approach captures changes in various aspects of the asset...

This paper provides new results to the literature, showing that output flexibility in oil production depends on the extraction technology. In particular, constructing a novel well-level monthly production data set covering more than 16,000 crude oil wells in North Dakota, we find supply...

We study the long-term impact of climate change on economic activity across countries, using a stochastic growth model where labour productivity is affected by country-specific climate variables - defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms. Using a panel...

This paper contributes to the climate-economy literature by analysing the role of weather patterns in influencing the transmission of global climate cycles to economic growth. More specifically, we focus on El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and their interactions with local weather...