This paper examines novel survey evidence on firms’ beliefs about macroeconomic tail risk and their role in investment decisions. In a large survey of German firms, I elicit (i) the subjective probability of a severe macroeconomic downturn and (ii) firms’ exposure to such an event. I...

The European higher education landscape has become increasingly integrated causing competition among universities that is no longer bound to national borders. In view of this development, the present paper investigates the relative efficiency of 450 European universities between 2011 and 2014....

This paper explores the evolution of non-working time in Spain over recent years by analysing the results of two surveys conducted by the National Statistics Institute: the Quarterly Survey on Labor Costs and the Labor Force Survey. Using time series models and intervention analysis, potential...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually,...

This note provides extensive evidence on the persistence properties of real GDP in 17 European countries and in the US over the period 1960-2023 using a fractional integration framework. The analysis suggests that in all cases shocks have permanent effects on the level of real GDP. This is...

This paper applies a fractional integration framework to investigate the behaviour of the stock returns of two sets of representative US companies with different environmental profiles, namely green versus polluting firms, as well as of the widely used CPU (Climate Policy Uncertainty) index over...

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,...

This paper is concerned with the problem of variable selection when the marginal effects of signals on the target variable as well as the correlation of the covariates in the active set are allowed to vary over time, without committing to any particular model of parameter instabilities. It poses...