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,...

This paper deals with the estimation of the output gap. We use uni- and bivariate unobserved components models in order to decompose the observed German GDP-series into trend, cycle and seasonal components. The results show that using the ifo business assessment variable as an indicator for the...

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical German data. Firms' forecasts improve with age. We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

In this paper, we develop a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We show that there is...