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...

A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable over time....

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as Markov-switching...

Es werden die makroökonomischen Prognosen der acht großen deutschen Forschungsinstitute evaluiert. Die Datenbasis umfasst die publizierten Prognosen für 11 Aggregate für den Zeitraum 2005 bis 2014. Zunächst wird jede Variable separat mittels aktueller Evaluationsmethoden untersucht. Diese...

Konjunkturprognostiker und deren prognostische Fähigkeiten standen schon oft im Kreuzfeuer der öffentlichen Kritik. Seit einiger Zeit mehren sich die Fragen über die Tauglichkeit von Konjunkturprognosen. Da war vom "Blindflug der Forscher" zu lesen (vgl. Der Spiegel 2005), Feuilletonisten...