This paper evaluates alternative indicators of global economic activity and other market fundamentals in terms of their usefulness for forecasting real oil prices and global petroleum consumption. We find that world industrial production is one of the most useful indicators that has been...

We analyse the drivers of European Power Exchange (EPEX) wholesale electricity prices between 2012 and early 2022 using machine learning. The agnostic random forest approach that we use is able to reduce in-sample root mean square errors (RMSEs) by around 50% when compared to a standard linear...

Power market integration is analyzed in a two countries model with nationally regulated firms and costly public funds. If generation costs between the two countries are too similar negative business-stealing outweighs efficiency gains so that following integration welfare decreases in both...

The ifo Institute is Germany's largest business survey provider, with the ifo Business Climate Germany as one of the most important leading indicators for gross domestic product. However, the ifo Business Survey is not solely limited to the Business Climate and also delivers a multitude of...

Using a registered pre-analysis plan, we survey college students during California’s Stay-at-Home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on key parameters that affect their marginal benefit from doing so. We find a quarter of students violated the...

This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

Many countries consider the lifting of restrictions of social contacts (RSC). We quantify the effects of RSC for Germany. We initially employ a purely statistical approach to predicting prevalence of COVID19 if RSC were upheld after April 20. We employ these findings and feed them into our...

Using a novel dataset that contains qualitative firm survey data on sales forecasts as well as balance-sheet data on realized sales, we document that only major forecast errors are predictable and display autocorrelation. This result is a particular violation of the Full Information Rational...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

This paper provides a detailed assessment of the real-time forecast accuracy of a wide range of vector autoregressive models (VAR) that allow for both structural change and indicators sampled at different frequencies. We extend the literature by evaluating a mixed-frequency time-varying...