We apply the boosting estimation method to investigate to what ex-tent and at what horizons macroeconomic time series have nonlinearpredictability coming from their own history. Our results indicate thatthe U.S. macroeconomic time series have more exploitable nonlinearpredictability than...

We use the gradient boosting estimation technique and the ROC curveto non-parametrically measure and exploit the maximal predictive powerof leading indicators for the future state of the business cycle. We de-velop novel procedures for finding the best performing transformationsof individual...

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...

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...

Reverse stress tests are a relatively new stress test instrument that aims at finding exactly those scenarios that cause a bank to cross the frontier between survival and default. Afterward, the scenario which is most probable has to be identified. This paper sketches a framework for a...

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...

Currently, the methods used by producers of official statistics do not facilitate the seasonal and calendar adjustment of daily time series, even though an increasing number of series with daily observations are available. The aim of this paper is the development of a procedure to estimate and...

This paper investigates the trade-off between timeliness and quality in nowcasting practices. This trade-off arises when the frequency of the variable to be nowcast, such as GDP, is quarterly, while that of the underlying panel data is monthly; and the latter contains both survey and...

"Closing borders is naive, the virus will come regardless" - this was the policy assumption that was repeatedly stated until mid-March by the WHO, the EU, as well as responsible authorities in Germany and other countries. Meanwhile, other states had started closing their borders to travellers...

This paper evaluates the quality of survey forecasts, their accuracy and unbiasedness, and their overall consistency. The paper also tries to find out whether the relationships between economic variables are the same in survey data and in the actual data. In other words we analyze whether the...