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...

FamData is a database covering family businesses and non-family businesses across various size classes and branches containing structural and financial information. The ifo Institute assembled a business panel with executives from almost 4,000 companies. In addition to the "hard" business data...

In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually,...

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...

Investitionen haben eine wichtige Rolle für das wirtschaftliche Wachstum einer Volkswirtschaft. Detaillierte Untersuchungen der Investitionstätigkeit von Wirtschaftszweigen liefern daher wesentliche Einblicke in wirtschaftliche Entwicklungstendenzen und helfen, Verschiebungen in der Bedeutung...

Das ifo Institut befragte im Auftrag der WirtschaftsWoche rund 600 Manager aus den Wirtschaftsbereichen Industrie, Bau, Handel und Dienstleistung nach ihren Einschätzungen der konjunkturellen Entwicklung im Jahr 2013 sowie zu ihren Investitions- und Beschäftigungsplänen für das neue Jahr....

This paper looks into the 'fine print' of boosting for economic forecasting. By using German industrial production for the period from 1996 to 2014 and a data set consisting of 175 monthly indicators, we evaluate which indicators get selected by the boosting algorithm over time and four...

An ongoing debate in the literature on efficiency of higher education institutions concerns the indicator for research output in the empirical analysis. While several studies chose to use the number of publications, others rely on the overall amount of research grants. The present study...