EU declares to provide support for the rural and poor regions of its member states. However, recent research shows that past EU budget allocations (in EU-15) can be attributed to measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers deciding on the bulk of EU spending. A...

It is a constant topic of debate how the European Union (EU) spends the money it collects from its member states. This paper supports the idea that the EU budget battle involves one-shot games that have persistent impacts on the budget allocations. In one way or the other, the member states are...

Recent research provides controversial evidence on the stability of yield-curve based binary probit models for forecasting U.S. recessions. This paper reviews so far applied specifications and presents new procedures for examining the stability of selected probit models. It finds that a...

Empirical evidence indicates local jurisdictions are internally more heterogeneous than standard sorting models predict. We develop a dynamic multi-region model, with fluctuating regional house prices, where an owner-occupying household's location choice depends on its current wealth and its...

Various papers indicate that the yield-curve has superior predictive power for U.S. recessions. However, there is controversial evidence on the stability of the predictive relationship and it has remained unclear how the persistence of the underlying binary recession indicator should be taken...

The problem is to predict whether a random outcome is a "success" (R=1) or a "failure" (R=0) given a continuous variable Z. The performance of a prediction rule $D=D(Z)\in \{1,0\}$ boils down to two probabilities, beta =Pr (D=1

We apply the boosting estimation method to investigate to what ex-tent and at what horizons macroeconomic time series have nonlinearpredictability coming from their own history. Our results indicate thatthe U.S. macroeconomic time series have more exploitable nonlinearpredictability than...

We use the gradient boosting estimation technique and the ROC curveto non-parametrically measure and exploit the maximal predictive powerof leading indicators for the future state of the business cycle. We de-velop novel procedures for finding the best performing transformationsof individual...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

This paper evaluates the economic effects of Turkish EU membership. The evaluation is based on a widely utilized computable general equilibrium model called GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project). Imperfect competition is modelled via assumption of scale economies on non agricultural sectors. The...