The DIW is the largest and oldest economics institute in Germany and conducts research in many fields of economic analysis. In this contribution to the conference celebrating the 80th birthday of this important institution I feel stimulated to address a few analytical issues, raising questions...

This paper adopts a novel approach to studying the evolution of interest rate term structure over the U.S. business cycles and to predicting recessions. Applying an effective algorithm, I classify the Treasury yield curve into distinct shapes and find the less frequent shapes intrinsically...

We assess the forecasting performance of the nowcasting model developed at the New York FED. We show that the observation regarding a striking difference in the model's predictive ability across business cycle phases made earlier in the literature also applies here. During expansions, the...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between nominal and real GDP growth for G7 countries for the period 1971 - 2018. A visual inspection of the data indicates the presence of a threshold, above which the structure of the relationship between nominal and real GDP growth rates changes from...

The recession in India and the UK peaked in 2017 due to the implications of new policy initiatives. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 intensified the crisis, causing a drastic decline in aggregate demand and output. India and the UK have resorted to monetary and...