Economies, societies, and many natural systems evolve and change, sometimes dramatically, so good models and accurate forecasts are vital for policymakers to prepare for and navigate these changes successfully. Yet history is littered with forecasts that went badly wrong, sharply illustrated...

Mineral and material commodities are essential inputs to economic production, but there have been periodical concerns about mineral scarcity. However, there has been no systematic recent study that has determined whether mineral commodities have become scarcer over the longer run. Here we...

To capture location shifts in the context of model selection, we propose selecting significant step indicators from a saturating set added to the union of all of the candidate variables. The null retention frequency and approximate non-centrality of a selection test are derived using a...

Outlying observations can bias regression estimates, requiring the use of robust estimators. Comparing robust estimates to those obtained using OLS is a common robustness check, however, such comparisons have been mostly informal due to the lack of available tests. Here we introduce a formal...

Human activity affects the Earth's climate while itself being affected by climate change. To empirically estimate the impact of humanity onto climate and vice versa, climate econometrics has emerged as a field split into two strands: one side focusing on conditional models of the economic impact...

Much of empirical research focuses on forward causal questions (``Does X cause Y?'') while answering reverse causal questions (``What causes Y?'') can provide invaluable insights but is difficult to implement in practice. Here we operationalise the modelling of reverse causal questions through...