Although the quantitative relationship between employment cyclicality and wage cyclicality is central for the dynamics of macroeconomic models, there is little empirical evidence on this topic. We use the German AWFP dataset to document that wage cyclicalities are very heterogeneous across...

We propose a multivariate Bayesian state space model to identify potential growth and the output gap consistent with the dynamics of the underlying production sectors of the economy and those of inflation and the labor market. Our approach allows us to decompose economic fluctuations and...

This paper presents a composite leading indicator for the Swiss business cycle corresponding to the growth rate cycle concept. It is the result of a complete overhaul of the KOF Economic Barometer that has been published by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute on a monthly basis since 1976. In line...

Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of...

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 this study we suggest a chronology of the classical business cycle in Switzerland. To this end we use two approaches: the approach of Artis et al. (2004) and an approach based on Markov-switching models (Hamilton, 1989). Our results show that similar conclusions can be reached by applying the...

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...

This paper tests the existence of strategic information complementarities as a source of sectoral comovement. A theoretical model derived in Veldkamp and Wolfers (2007) explains sectoral comovement by the assumption that firms rely too much on aggregate information to make output decisions. We...

This paper estimates forward-looking Taylor rules for the euro area. Using the asymmetries in inflation and cyclical output developments across countries, we investigate the adequacy of the single monetary policy for each of the EuropeanMonetary Union (EMU) member countries. Notable differences...

This paper is the first to analyze how much the probability of selecting a worker from a pool of applicants fluctuates over the business cycle. We use the German Job Vacancy Survey to construct the selection rate on the regional, industry, and national level and show that it is negatively...