Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper...

This paper analyzes the response of the European stock markets to the monetary policy shocks by the European Central Bank using the heteroskedasticity based approach of Rigobon (2003). We find that monetary policy tightening has a heterogeneous impact on the Euro Area sectors on the day the...

In this paper, the extent of the shadow economy in OECD countries is investigated. The estimates of the size of the shadow economy are obtained using the panel-data techniques applied to the data on 38 OECD member states over the period 1991-2007. Our estimates tend to be somewhat lower than the...

This paper investigates the income convergence among Russian regions in the period 1998- 2006. It makes two major contributions to rather extensive literature on the regional con- vergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it...

Recent studies suggest that US and other developed economies have become considerably stabilized in terms of volatility since the mid-1980s (Stock and Watson, 2002). This study models the structural break in volatility using a dynamic factor model with two state variables: one capturing cyclical...

We suggest an alternative indicator based on the car sales price placed on the Internet for measuring economic inequality among regions. The regional data on car prices in Germany were downloaded from two specialised websites http://www.mobile.de and http://www.autoscout24.de in December 2011....

Aircraft noise is a particularly problematic source of noise as many airports are located in or near major cities and, as a result, densely populated areas are affected. Data from the Berlin Aging Study II (Berliner Altersstudie II, BASE-II), whose socio-economic module is based on the...

Aircraft noise is a particularly problematic source of noise as many airports are located in or near major cities and, as a result, densely populated areas are affected. Data from the Berlin Aging Study II (Berliner Altersstudie II, BASE-II), whose socio-economic module is based on the...