We develop a framework for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, e.g., both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national...

The present note raises the issue of how best to interpret the World Bank's (WB) much used "constant USD per capita income" concept and similar series. We find that the guide to its construction appearing on the WB data portal to be sketchy. The procedures essentially convert all host-country...

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

To date, only annual information on economic activity is published for the 16 German states. In this paper, we calculate quarterly regional GDP estimates for the period between 1995 to 2021, thereby improving the regional database for Germany. The new data set will regularly be updated when...

Direct measures of the economic impact of sanctions are contaminated by the endogeneity that arises when other events in target countries (e.g., civil or interstate conflicts, political independence, etc.) instigate the imposition of sanctions. To address this issue, we propose a novel...

Quarterly GDP figures usually are published with a delay of some weeks. A common way to generate GDP series of higher frequency, i.e. to nowcast GDP, is to use available indicators to calculate a single index by means of a common factor derived from a dynamic factor model (DFM). This paper deals...

Economic shocks often permeate borders generating comovement in nations ́business cycles over time. We highlight the fact that fiscal policy coordination is an important avenue by which national economies become more integrated, influencing the transmission of macroeconomic shocks between...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

This paper derives new theoretical results for forecasting with Global VAR (GVAR) models. It is shown that the presence of a strong unobserved common factor can lead to an undeter-mined GVAR model. To solve this problem, we propose augmenting the GVAR with additional proxy equations for the...

This paper analyses the long memory properties of quarterly real output per capita in the US (1948Q1 - 2008Q3) using non-parametric, semi-parametric and parametric techniques. The results vary substantially depending on the methodology employed. Evidence of mean reversion is obtained in a...