1,721,000 research outputs found
Economic forecasts and fiscal policy in the recently acceded Member States
Forecast errors are large in the recently acceded Member States and the mistakes have a similar order of magnitude in the Commission services' forecasts, Consensus forecasts and projections made by national authorities. The prediction mistakes cannot be attributed to bias or autocorrelation. Volatility in the economic developments and data revisions creating uncertainty on the state of the economy appear the main explanation for the difficulty to make good forecasts. Prediction mistakes for GDP growth lead to wrong projections for general government balances through the operation of the automatic stabilisers, but errors in the discretionary part of the government balance are the largest source of fiscal forecast mistakes. Growth forecast errors influence fiscal policy decisions.Forecast error, fiscal policy, growth forecast, projection volatility, Filip Keereman
An indicator-based short-term forecast for quarterly GDP in the euro area.
This paper discusses an approach to estimate euro area GDP quarterly growth over two quarters ahead. The estimates are derived from separate single equations for each quarter to be forecast using OLS including a moving error term. The explanatory variables describe real economic activity or its assessment in opinion surveys, and financial variables, both of the euro area and the US. The euro area opinion survey variables are the present business situation in the retail sector and the construction confidence indicator, while the US National Association of Purchasing Managers index of the manufacturing industry reflects the importance of international economic links. There are two financial variables. First, the relative yield spread between the euro area and the US. Second, the real effective exchange rate is an indication of the competitive position of euro area exporterseuro, quaterly forecast, GDP
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The track record of the Commission forecasts
This paper argues that the Commission forecasts dispose of a reasonable track record. Most of the traditional tests for examining the quality of predictions are passed in a satisfactory way. The comparisons with forecasts made by the IMF, OECD and national forecast institutes are not unfavourable for the European Commission. In particular it is found that there is no strong evidence of presenting an overly optimistic picture of the economy in the Commission short-term forecasts. The rosy gloss which, according to some, sometimes hangs over the Commission forecasts is related to some form of cycle denial. This could maybe lead to an optimistic bias further ahead in the future, but applying this to the short-term forecasts of the European Commission is unjustified.economic forecasts, evaluation
External assumptions, the international environment and the track record of the Commission Forecast
While in the Commission Forecasts interest rates, exchange rates or oil prices are treated more like assumptions, it is interesting to test their realism. It appears that these variables are formulated in a reasonably accurate way and that in general alternative assumptions would not improve the picture.commission forecasts, interest rates, exchange rates, gdp, inflation, forecasts, Keereman
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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