In this paper, we study the predictive power of electricity consumption data for regional economic activity. Using unique weekly and monthly electricity consumption data for the second-largest German state, the Free State of Bavaria, we conduct a pseudo out-of-sample forecasting experiment for...

Climate change policies have been rising to the top of the global political agenda, but how should governments finance them? Public economists propose solutions based on economic theory, but their political feasibility depends on voters’ support, and ordinary households often neglect economic...

We study the link between expected inflation and wages using novel panel data from German firms and employees. We find that pass-through—the percentage point change in wage growth given a one percentage point change in expected inflation—is small: 0.11–0.17 for firms and 0.03–0.07 for...

Climate change policies have been rising to the top of the global political agenda, but how should governments finance them? Public economists propose solutions based on economic theory, but their political feasibility depends on voters’ support, and ordinary households often neglect economic...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a unique data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

Over the last decade, the topic of regional economic forecasting has become increasingly prevalent in academic literature. The most striking problem in this context is data availability at a regional level. However, considerable methodological improvements have been made to address this problem....

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

This paper applies component-wise boosting to the topic of regional economic forecasting. Component-wise boosting is a pre-selection algorithm of indicators for forecasting. By using unique quarterly real gross domestic product data for two German states (the Free State of Saxony and...

In this paper we transfer the Elo rating system, which is widely accepted in chess, sports and other disciplines, to rank scientific journals. The advantage of the Elo system is the explicit consideration of the factor time or the history of a journal’s performance. Most other rankings that...

This paper investigates the main determinants of the regional representation of foreign employees in Germany. Since migration determinants are not necessarily the same for workers of different nationalities, we explain spatial patterns not only for total foreign employment but also for the 35...