We estimate forward-looking interest rate reaction functions in the spirit of Taylor (1993) for four major central banks augmented by implicit volatilities of stock market indices to proxy financial market stress. Our results suggest that the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank and the...

The banking debacle of 2007/2008 and the Greek sovereign debt crisis have witnessed that forecasts of government balances play a major role for how participants in financial markets assess the sustainability of government budget deficits. But how do forecasters form their government-balance...

We analyzed whether, in democratic open societies, economic and demographic conditions allow sporting success at the aggregate level to be predicted. Theoretical considerations led to the hypothesis that the population size and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita should be important...

The Greek sovereign debt crisis of 2009/2010 fostered widespread fears of contagion. We analyzed the danger of contagion by studying to which extent news to speculative bubbles in the Greek equity market spread to the equity markets of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. To this end, we...

We apply an approach recently developed by Elliott et al. (Rev. Ec. Studies. 72, 1197-1125, 2005) to study whether forecasts of the dollar/British pound exchange rate extracted from a panel of survey data are consistent with an asymmetric loss function. We find that only few forecasters seem to...