In this paper we present the Ifo Investment Database, which provides annual investment data for 12 investment assets in 50 German industries from 1991 onward. The data is consistent with national accounts statistics provided by the German Federal Statistical Office and is based on investments in...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

One of the core indicators in the field of scientometrics is the number of papers published by a unit within a given period. However, such indicators can only be assessed properly by considering the unit's available resources. When evaluating the efficiency of institutions worldwide, the problem...

In this article, we revisit the analysis of Laband and Tollison (2006) who documented that articles with two authors in alphabetical order are cited much more often than non-alphabetized papers with two authors in the American Economic Review and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics....

The ifo Institute for Economic Research has been conducting the ifo business survey since its foundation in 1949. To ensure stability of participation rates, regular sample recruitment is indispensable. Does the dispatch method matter for response rates of a recruiting campaign? To answer this...

The monthly ifo Business Survey is the basis for numerous economic indicators, such as the ifo Business Climate Index Germany. Moreover, the anonymized micro data can be used for a wide range of research projects. In order to obtain robust results, the panel of survey participants must be large...

The ifo Business Climate Index for Germany is considered as the most important leading indicator for the German economy. Media reports often refer to the mood in German boardrooms. Based on a survey conducted in May 2023, we show that most of the around 9,000 respondents to the monthly ifo...

We introduce archetypal analysis as a tool to describe and categorize scientists. This approach identifies typical characteristics of extreme ('archetypal') values in a multivariate data set. These positive or negative contextual attributes can be allocated to each scientists under...