Long-term contracts are an important element of all economic activity and, thus, critical for understanding modern economic structures. The natural gas industry provides particular insights into the functioning and dynamics of long-term contracts and industry structures, in a sector that is...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

In this paper, we examine beta-convergence of real per-capita income of Chinese counties. We account for both the spatial dependences between counties and the possibility of different convergence regimes. The first feature is captured by the spatial error term, whereas the second one is modeled...

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...

We develop a composite indicator measuring the performance of national innovation systems. The indicator takes into account both "hard" factors that are quantifiable (such as R&D spending, number of patents) and "soft" factors like the assessment of preconditions for innovation by managers. We...

The growing literature on the potential role of energy resources around the Caspian Sea is dominated by geoplitics whereas economic aspects have been largely neglected thus far. The relevance of Caspian oil and gas reserves continues to be praised, though objective data on production and exports...

Shipbuilding has changed from a "heavy industry" to become a capital- and technologyintensive activity over the last decades. While Japanese, South Korean and Western European yards dominate the merchant shipbuilding market so far, Eastern European yards are increasingly active, in particular in...

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

In this paper, we propose an indicator of the homeownership rate based on Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. We constructed the HOR estimate using the number of ads in four different markets (flats for rent, flats for sale, houses for rent, and houses for sale). Our HOR...