Adaptive Methods in Macroeconomic Forecasting

Adaptive methods are used to forecast three main Austrian economic indicators. We use a weighted recursive model as well as a neural network approach both with and without adaptive characteristics and compare our results to the forecasts of two Austrian research institutes. It appears that even models which use very limited information can outperform the two Institutes’ forcasts of the unemployment rate. For the case of most series adaptivity represents a possibility of improving the forecasts. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ready to stop: socioeconomic status and the fertility transition in Stockholm, 1878–1926

The western fertility decline is arguably the most significant demographic change to have occurred in the past 200 years, yet its causes and processes are still shrouded in ambiguity due to a lack of individual‐level longitudinal data. A growing body of research has helped improve our understanding of the decline's causes by examining the development of socioeconomic differences in fertility using historical micro‐data, but these have largely only considered rural areas where fertility was generally slower to decline. This article contributes to the literature by utilizing individual‐level data from the Roteman Database for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926 to examine the association of socioeconomic status and fertility and the adoption of stopping behaviour during the city's transition. Using piecewise constant hazard models and logistic regression, we find that a clear class pattern arises in which the elite were early practitioners of fertility control, followed by the working classes. As the transition unfolded, socioeconomic differences in stopping behaviour disappeared and overall fertility differentials were also minimized, both of them being consistent with patterns observed in rural populations. The implications of these findings for major explanations of the decline are discussed in the concluding section.     

Expected Returns,Time-varying Risk,and Risk Premia

A new empirical model for intertemporal capital asset pricing is presented that allows both time-varying risk premia and betas where the latter are identified from the dynamics of the conditional covariance of returns. The model is more successful in explaining the predictable variations in excess returns when the returns on the stock market and corporate bonds are included as risk factors than when the stock market is the single factor. Although changes in the covariance of returns induce variations in the betas, most of the predictable movements in returns are attributed to changes in the risk premia.     

INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS IN THE EMU PROCESS

European progress toward monetary union takes place within the highly institutionalized setting of the European Community (EC). This paper examines the ways in which formal institutions and decisionmaking procedures have constrained the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) process. The EC's structure has both created demands for and facilitated cross-issue linkages, and these linkages characterize the successful bargaining on EMU. However, success also requires ratification. Domestic ratification procedures and changes in the EC's context of linkage have created challenges for the ratification of the Maastricht treaty. Ratification is also tied to concerns about democratic accountability, which arise from current legislative procedures and are the subject of ongoing institutional reform.     

COMPARATIVE WELL-BEING OF CHILDREN AND ELDERLY

This paper compares the economic well-being of children and the elderly to each other in the United States and across six industrialized countries. Using the Luxembourg Income Study database, we find that U.S. children–whose economic status is measured by their family income–are generally worse off than U.S. elderly in terms of both poverty and adjusted mean income. Moreover, U.S. children are worse off in terms of higher poverty rates than are the children in any of the other countries studied. The paper presents a variety of explanations for these differences.     

An Investigation into the Major Causes 01 Australia's Recent Inflation and Some Policy Implications*

This paper investigates the major causes of Australia's recent inflation with special emphasis on the 1970s and early 1980s A general model of inflation is formulated based upon a vector auto-regression The main empirical finding is that increases in wages and import prices and more recently in money have been significant causal factors of Australia's inflationary experience. Government current expenditure is found to contribute passively to cost-push inflation     

Fundamental Economic Variables,Expected Returns,and Bond Fund Performance

In this article, we develop relative pricing (APT) models that are successful in explaining expected returns in the bond market. We utilize indexes as well as unanticipated changes in economic variables as factors driving security returns. An innovation in this article is the measurement of the economic factors as changes in forecasts. The return indexes are the most important variables in explaining the time series of returns. However, the addition of the economic variables leads to a large improvement in the explanation of the cross-section of expected returns. We utilize our relative pricing models to examine the performance of bond funds.