GDP is measured with error. But data uncertainty rarely communicated quantitatively in real-time. An exception are the fan charts for historical growth published by Bank of England. To assess how well understood is, we first evaluate accuracy and compare them models past revisions data. Secondly, to gauge perceptions across a wider set experts, conduct new online survey. Our results call greate...

Does U.S. state pension funding affect real GDP growth rates? Do states that witness higher GDP growth also have better funded pensions? Can one expect less GDP growth when state pensions are poorly funded? My study took the funding ratio of state pension plans, the asset-to-liability ratio, and compared it with real state GDP levels. The methods I used consisted of time series panel data regre...

This paper analyzes factors contributing to terrorism, using its initial meaning from the French Revolution in which the state is the terrorist. The independent economic variables are mineral exports/GDP, military expenditures/GDP, real GDP growth, real per capita GDP, and population density, and the dependent variable is democide, the murder of people by government. Analysis of the data indica...

Gauging economic conditions in real time is challenging, in part because economic data are difficult to measure and subject to subsequent revision as more information becomes available. This article investigates the pattern and size of revisions to real gross domestic product (GDP) over the past decade or so. Revisions to early estimates of GDP can be large and, over the past 15 years, have ten...

This study of the impact of economic freedom on per capita real GDP among OECD nations over the 2002-2006 period, with each OECD nation during this time frame being treated as a de facto “economic region” within the OECD, finds strong initial support for the hypothesis proffered here, namely, the higher the degree of economic freedom, the higher the level of economic activity and hence the high...

The main goal of the paper is to investigate whether real GDP follows a trend stationary or a different stationary process. Our hypothesis is that real output is characterized by a non-linear mean reverting process. It is flexible Fourier stationary unit root test proposed by Enders and Lee (2004, 2009) to assess the nonstationary properties of the real GDP per capita that has been applied for ...

This appendix discusses numerous robustness checks of our baseline estimates of the effect of financial distress on output. All of the alternatives described use our new measure of financial distress as the explanatory variable. We discuss the results using both industrial production and real GDP as the output variable. However, for simplicity, the graphs only show the results for real GDP. Eac...