Julkaisuarkisto

Official NBER recession dates are announced with substantial delay. Therefore, real-time forecasters cannot condition on the most recent business cycle states even though recessions and expansions are highly persistent. I study whether real-time coincident releases can substitute for this missing information. At each monthly forecast origin, I construct a recession nowcast, using four coincident indicators and several supervised classifiers, and add this nowcast probability to standard probit forecasting models. In an out-of-sample evaluation for US monthly data from 1986 to 2021, nowcast augmentation improves forecast accuracy at short horizons and at the 1-year horizon relative to a term spread benchmark, while including the raw coincident indicators directly is less effective. The gains are incremental once strong leading indicators are included, and model rankings are sensitive to resampling variation.

Dynamic factor models (DFMs) have found great success in nowcasting and short-term macroeconomic forecasting when incorporating large sets of predictive information. The factor loadings are typically estimated cross-sectionally with principal component analysis (PCA) or maximum likelihood (ML), which ignore whether the factors have predictive power. We suggest two novel alternative approaches using partial least squares to estimate large vector autoregressions (VARs) and DFMs, which take the dynamic dependencies better into account. Our Monte Carlo simulations and forecasting results for the Finnish GDP growth show that these methods generally perform on par with and under certain conditions better than the existing approaches.

In the summer of 1971, broadcasters in the United States rallied to defeat a contempt citation in the House of Representatives. Congressman Harley O. Staggers recommended holding Dr. Frank Stanton of CBS in contempt over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for unaired materials related to the production of the CBS News broadcast The Selling of the Pentagon. This moment is often remembered as a landmark victory for the freedom of the press. Yet behind the success were conservative local broadcasters across the country who defended neither CBS News nor journalistic principles but rather their own business interests. Revisiting the confrontation makes clear that attempts to regulate and control television constitute a political process rife with competing, and at times contradictory, interests, highlighting tension between the local and national and between business and journalism as central themes in television history.

Poly(allyl diglycol carbonate), CR-39, is a common type of plastic used in detecting and measuring radiation exposure. Incident particles damage the polymer, leaving behind latent tracks. During chemical etching, these tracks are then preferentially etched, resulting in microscale tracks where the particles have passed. In electrochemical cells, pits in CR-39 detectors have been used as evidence for presence of nuclear reactions during palladium–deuterium co-deposition. This research focuses on replicating these measurements and investigating parameters affecting pit formation. With appropriate cell designs, pits can be produced without palladium and/or deuterium in the system. Free radical formation and cavitation are proposed as alternative CR-39 damaging mechanisms. CR-39 response to ultrasound cavitation indicates cavitation as the predominant source of the initial damage on CR-39 surfaces. Pits produced during metal-hydride/deuteride co-deposition and subsequent hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) processes after etching had their diameters distributed into two partially overlapping normal distributions. Comparisons with literature suggested this diametral distribution bifurcation could be the result of cavitation collapse of two types of evolved gas nanobubbles. Spherical nanobubbles and high contact angle surface nanobubbles produce jets during their collapse, creating seed damages relative to their projection, with the spherical bubble collapse producing deeper impressions. Surface damage differences on CR-39 surface are then magnified during the etching process resulting in the observed diametral distributions. The results of this study indicate that work involving CR-39 detectors in systems with gas evolution should take cavitation effects into account, as polymer-damaging cavitation events occur during electrolysis. They also underline that CR-39 detectors can serve as a tool to characterize degradation caused by cavitation in electrolyzers.

Zoonotic hepeviruses, particularly hepatitis E virus (HEV, species Paslahepevirus balayani) represent a major yet underestimated public health challenge in Europe. Despite being the leading cause of acute viral hepatitis, surveillance, diagnostic practices and prevention strategies remain heterogeneous across EU/EEA countries, limiting comparability and hindering accurate burden estimates. Underdiagnosis is further compounded by extrahepatic manifestations and the growing impact of chronic HEV infection in immunocompromised patients. At the human–animal–environment interface, zoonotic HEV circulates widely in domestic pigs, wildlife and food products, while coordinated surveillance and control measures remain inconsistently implemented. The recent recognition of ratHEV (species Rocahepevirus ratti) as a cause of acute and chronic hepatitis in Europe further expands the spectrum of zoonotic hepevirus infections and underscores the need for integrated One Health approaches. To address these challenges, the One Health Zoonotic Hepevirus Network (ONWARD; COST Action CA24140) was launched in 2025 as a pan-European, multidisciplinary collaboration uniting experts across human, veterinary, food safety and environmental health sectors. ONWARD aims to harmonise diagnostic tools, strengthen clinical research, integrate multisectoral surveillance, promote capacity building and support evidence-based policy development. By fostering coordination with European stakeholders ONWARD provides a structured framework to strengthen preparedness, surveillance and response to zoonotic hepevirus threats across Europe.