Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed...

We present a comprehensive disaggregate approach for short-term forecasting economic activity in Germany by explicitly taking into account the supply or production side and the demand side of GDP. The GDP figures calculated by the two sides usually yield different results and the official GDP...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...

Multivariate distributional forecasts have become widespread in recent years. To assess the quality of such forecasts, suitable evaluation methods are needed. In the univariate case, calibration tests based on the probability integral transform (PIT) are routinely used. However, multivariate...

Johansen (2002) suggests a counterfactual experiment that can be implemented in the vector autoregressive model to interpret the coefficients of an identified cointegrating relation. This article proposes an alternative counterfactual experiment ("design of experiment") that, contrary to the one...

There has been increased interest in the use of "big data" when it comes to forecasting macroeconomic time series such as private consumption or unemployment. However, applications on forecasting GDP are rather rare. In this paper we incorporate Google search data into a Bridge Equation Model, a...

Recently, several institutions have increased their forecast horizons, and many institutions rely on their past forecast errors to estimate measures of forecast uncertainty. This work addresses the question how the latter estimation can be accomplished if there are only very few errors available...