In this paper, we examine the predictive ability of automatic and expert-rated media sentiment indicators for German inflation. We find that sentiment indicators are competitive in providing inflation forecasts against a large set of common macroeconomic and financial predictors. Sophisticated...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

In this paper a mixed-frequency VAR à la Mariano & Murasawa (2004) with Markov regime switching in the parameters is estimated by Bayesian inference. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to...

We propose a noncausal autoregressive model with time-varying parameters, and apply it to U.S. postwar inflation. The model fits the data well, and the results suggest that inflation persistence follows from future expectations. Persistence has declined in the early 1980s and slightly increased...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of both the conditional mean and variance of UK real GDP over the period 1851-2013 by estimating a multivariate ARFIMA-FIGARCH model (with the unemployment rate and inflation as explanatory variables). The results suggest that this series is...

The energy transition requires substantial amounts of metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Are these metals a key bottleneck? We identify metal-specific demand shocks, estimate supply elasticities and pin down the price impact of the energy transition in a structural scenario...

This paper examines the bank lending channel of monetary transmission in Malaysia, a country with a dual banking system including both Islamic and conventional banks, over the period 1994:01-2015:06. A two-regime threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) model is estimated to take into account...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

This article sheds light on the interaction of media, economic actors, and economic experts. Based on a unique data set of 86,000 news items rated by professional analysts of Media Tenor International and survey data, we first analyze the overall tone of the media, consumers', firms', and...

This paper presents a revised version of the DIW Economic Barometer, the business cycle index of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As in earlier versions, we put forward a factor model on a monthly frequency to filter the latent state of the aggregate economy. In the new...