In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source both for the spread of existing and new economic research. Furthermore the calculation of rankings for authors and academic institutions play a central role. We provide some cautionary...

It is well-known that nonresponse affects the results of surveys and can even causebias due to selectivities if it cannot be regarded as missing at random. In contrast tohousehold surveys, response behaviour in business surveys has been examined rarely inthe literature. This paper is one of the...

With the world-wide spread of the internet in the 1990s, the conduction of web or e-mailsurveys became popular in research. Although these surveys provide fast data collectionand reduced costs, results may suffer from biases due to the survey mode. While a varietyof studies concerning mode...

Business cycle indicators based on the balance statistics are a widely used method tomonitor the actual economic situation. In contrast to official data, indicators frombusiness surveys are early available and typically not revised after their first publication.But as surveys can be in general...

Surveys are a widely used tool to answer socio-economic research question across disciplines. However, data collection can face certain problems such as nonresponding units. For household and population surveys, a large body of literature about the effects of nonresponse exist but only less is...

This paper compares the German Gross Domestic Product between 1991 and 2008 with the Ifo business indicators. Because GDP is published quarterly but the Ifo indicators monthly, the most analyses compare these variables by merging the indicators to quarterly data. In this paper an alternative way...

This study was prepared by Beate Schirwitz while she was working at the Ifo Institute’s Dresden Branch. It was completed in February 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Faculty of Law, Management, and Economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in July 2012. It focuses on a...

Im Fokus der Studie stehen die in den zwanzig Jahren nach der Vereinigung in Ostdeutschland erzielten Fortschritte. Es erfolgt ein Vergleich zwischen der wirtschaftlichen Situation in Ostdeutschland im Jahr 2008 und der Ausgangslage in der DDR im Jahr 1989. Die typischerweise für ökonomische...