For many years, Business Tendency Surveys on the basis of mailing suffer from an erosion of the response rate. To counter this problem, there are traditional methods as limitation of the number of questions, improvement of the design of the questionnaire, intensified recalls by mail or...

In their introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Great Depressions of the 20th Century" (Vol. 5, 2002), Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott argue that in the last few years "great depressions" have hit two rich countries: New Zealand and Switzerland. We...