Globalisation has a major impact on the levels and distribution of wealth. The financial markets are highly integrated, and valuations of financial assets follow international patterns, which has contributed to large increases in financial wealth over the past 25 years. Nonetheless, this has not...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

Predictability is time and frequency dependent. We propose a new forecasting method - forecast combination in the frequency domain - that takes this fact into account. With this method we forecast the equity premium and real GDP growth rate. Combining forecasts in the frequency domain produces...

This paper examines the effect of national income on the total fertility rate (children born per woman). We estimate the effects on fertility of shocks to national per capita income using plausibly exogenous variations in oil price shock as an instrument for income and using instrumental...

In this paper, we analyse Okun's law - a relation between the change in the unemployment rate and GDP growth - using data from Australia, the euro area, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we assess the relevance of non-Gaussianity when modelling the relation. This is...

Business bribery is a particularly serious problem in the integration era. First, this article investigates the effects of institutional obstacles on firms' bribery in 131 countries classified by nation income groups. Through the appropriate proposal of fitting functions, the relationship...

We propose a simple and reproducible methodology to create a single equation forecasting model (SEFM) for low-frequency macroeconomic variables. Our methodology is illustrated by forecasting annual real GDP growth rates for 52 African countries, where the data are obtained from the World Bank...

This study aims to construct a new monthly leading indicator for Tunisian economic activity and to forecast Tunisian quarterly real GDP (RGDP) using several mixed-frequency models. These include a mixed dynamic factor model, unrestricted mixed-data sampling (UMIDAS), and a threepass regression...

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

We provide key insights on expectation formation based on the Bloomberg economic survey: around two thirds of professional forecasters provide GDP forecasts that are temporally consistent, meaning that quarterly forecasts add up to the annual. Temporally consistent forecasts are not more...

We document whether a simple, univariate model for quarterly GDP growth is able to deliver forecasts in a crisis period like the Covid-19 pandemic, which may serve cross-checking forecasts obtained from elaborate and expert models used by forecasting institutions. We include shocks to the log...

This research aims to examine the effects of remittance outflows on Saudi's non-oil economic growth (NOGDP). While few studies have examined the effects of remittance outflows on remitting countries' economic development, none have looked into the asymmetric impact on Saudi Arabia's non-oil...

In recent decades, the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) has changed international trade patterns. Today, the production of goods involves international production sharing, which allows countries to trace the value-added distribution to international trade. However, the COVID-19 pandemic...

This empirical study evaluates European tourism demand in Spain from 2000 to 2020. To test the hypotheses, we have modelled tourism demand, which is measured in terms of travellers arriving in Spain. An Error Correction Model adapted to a panel structure has been utilised to work within a time...

Noting that few studies to date have investigated the determinants of social cohesion in a comprehensive and systematic manner, this paper examines the macro-level determinants of social cohesion using a panel of up to 92 developing and developed countries for the period 1990-2020. Employing the...

This study aims to determine the impact of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and green innovation on the renewable energy (RE) supply (RES) by taking panel heterogeneity and cross-section dependence into account. The dataset of this study covers a panel of BRICS...

This paper examines the effect of national income on the total fertility rate (children born per woman). We estimate the effects on fertility of shocks to national per capita income using plausibly exogenous variations in oil price shock as an instrument for income and using instrumental...

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the key indicator of the health of an economy and can be easily compared across countries. But it has limitations. GDP tells what is going on today, but does not inform about sustainability of growth. The majority of time is spent in home production, yet the value...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The elasticity is 1.55 for emerging markets...

Well-being is increasingly viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon, of which income is only one facet. In this paper I focus on another one, health, and look at its synthetic measure, life expectancy at birth, and its relationship with per capita income. International trends of life expectancy...

To date, only annual information on economic activity is published for the 16 German states. In this paper, we calculate quarterly regional GDP estimates for the period between 1995 to 2020, thereby improving the regional database in Germany. The new data set will regularly be updated when...