We examine whether German state governments manipulated fiscal forecasts before elections. Our data set includes three fiscal measures over the period 1980-2014. The results do not show that electoral motives influenced fiscal forecasts in West German states. By contrast, East German state...

This paper argues that probability forecasts convey information on the uncertainties that surround macroeconomic forecasts in a manner which is straightforward and which is preferable to other alternatives, including the use of confidence intervals. Probability forecasts relating to UK output...

This paper explores a range of different forecast methods for Brent oil prices and analyses their performance relative to oil futures and the random walk over the period 1995Q1 - 2015Q2, including periods of stable, upwardly trending and rapidly dropping oil prices. None of the individual...

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...

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...

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...

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...

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook declined and business uncertainty increased only when the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led to domestic policy changes: The announcement of nation-wide school closures on March 13...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic projections of the German government since the 1970s and compares it those of the Joint Economic Forecast, which is an in-dependent forecasting institution in Germany. Our results indicate that nominal GDP projections are upward biased for longer...