Forecasting real economic activity poses a considerable challenge not only due to hard-to-predict events like the current financial crisis but also due to the fact that targeted variables often undergo significant revisions after their first publication. In this paper we report the results of a...

Growth regression economics are haunted by the fact that results are easily overthrown by regressing alternative model specifications. Recent research therefore aims at obtaining robust regression results by systematically running multiple models and picking surviving variables. This note shows...

In this paper we measure the speed at which firms adjust to demand shocks using individual firm data. Identification of shocks is achieved by a combination of quantitative and qualitative judgments on capacity utilisation in micro survey data. A novel feature of our approach is the distinction...

In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms’ responses in business...

The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt holds that despite the huge transfers from West to East Germany the East German economy does not take off as it was widely expected. We argue it is not despite these transfers but because of them. Building on the common features of the extension of the...

Qualitative surveys enjoy huge popularity among business cycle analysts and research institutes since they provide fast information on the stance of the economy. However, in order to derive quantitative statements researchers have to rely on assumptions about the relation between quantitative...

We investigate how firms' market power affects the price level. In our small macro- model we show, that firms - in addition to hypothesised structural mark-up pricing power - may take advantage of favourable business cycle fluctuations. The paper provides empirical evidence for both these...

Economists and econometricians very often work with data which has been temporally disaggregated prior to use. Hence, the quality of the disaggregation clearly aspects the qual- ity of the analyses. Building on Chow and Lin's (1971) disaggregation model this paper proposes a new estimation...