We study the inflation uncertainty reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters 1969-1999. Three popular methods of estimating uncertainty from survey data are analysed in the context of models for forecasting and asset pricing. We find that inflation uncertainty...

We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy...

Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...

Firms expect certain investment expenditures. Firms realize certain investment expenditures. The difference is an investment surprise. With the help of the IFO Investment Survey for the German manufacturing sector we measure firms’ (quantitative) investment expectations and firms’...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 27 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

We derive a comprehensive one-year ahead forecasting model of US per capita GDP for 1955-2000, collectively examining variables usually considered singly, e.g. interest rates, credit conditions, the stock market, oil prices and the yield gap, of which all, except the last, are found to matter....

We provide a summary updated guide for the construction, use and evaluation of leading indicators, and an assessment of the most relevant recent developments in this field of economic forecasting. To begin with, we analyse the problem of selecting a target coincident variable for the leading...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid-eighties is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism.

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

This paper presents experimental evidence from a monetary sticky price economy in which output and inflation depend on expected future inflation. With rational inflation expectations, the economy does not generate persistent deviations of output and inflation in response to a monetary shock. In...