In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

In their introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on Great Depressions of the 20th Century (Vol. 5, 2002), Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott argue that in the last few years great depressions have hit two rich countries: New Zealand and Switzerland. We briefly...

This paper demonstrates spatial evaluation methods on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study using geo-coordinates and spatially relevant indicators from remote sensing data. By geocoding the addresses of private households (while not identifying them by name and while...

This paper demonstrates the spatial evaluation of survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study using geo-coordinates and spatially relevant indicators from remote sensing data. By geocoding the addresses of survey households with block-level geographic precision (while...

This study examines the phenomenon of nonresponse in the first wave of a refresher sample (subsample H) of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Our first step is to link additional (commercial) microgeographic data on the immediate neighborhoods of the households visited by...

Since it is still unclear to what extent time allocation retrospectively reported in questionnaires, reflects people's actual behavior, examining the accuracy of responses to time use survey questions is of crucial importance. We analyze the congruence of time use information assessed through...

Die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) hat jüngst Richtlinien für Studien, die Basisdaten für gesundheitspolitische Entscheidungen im Pandemiefall liefern können, veröffentlicht. Durch die Zusammenarbeit zwischen unterschiedlichen Disziplinen kann es gelingen, evidenzbasierte Entscheidungen...

There are strong two-way links between parent and child happiness (life satisfaction), even for children who have grown up, moved to their own home and partnered themselves. German panel evidence shows that transmission of (un)happiness from parents to children is partly due to transmission of...