The ability of Google Trends data to forecast the number of new daily cases and deaths of COVID-19 is examined using a dataset of 158 countries. The analysis includes the computations of lag correlations between confirmed cases and Google data, Granger causality tests, and an out-of-sample...

Sergey Aivazian was the head of my department at the Moscow School of Economics, but he was much more than that. He played an important role in my life, and he contributed to my studies devoted to copula modelling. This small memoir reports how this amazingly polite and smart scientist helped me...

The paper compares one-period ahead forecasting performance of linear vector-autoregressive (VAR) models and single-equation Markov-switching (MS) models for two cases: when leading information is available and when it is not. The results show that single-equation MS models tend to perform...

This paper investigates the relationship between the bitcoin price and the hashrate by disentangling the effects of the energy efficiency of the bitcoin mining equipment, bitcoin halving, and of structural breaks on the price dynamics. For this purpose, we propose a methodology based on...

I present evidence that higher frequency measures of inflation expectations outperform lower frequency measures of inflation expectations in tests of accuracy, predictive power, and rationality. For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the...

The transition process of the Romanian economy motivated the design of a model that provides for a parsimonious representation of the structure of the economy, exploits the increased availability of data for the system of national accounts, and recognizes time-variant parameters that can result...