Recent analyses relate increases in the growth rate of countries to anticipation effects caused by bidding for the Olympic Games, so called news shocks. We argue that these findings should be interpreted cautiously. First, these analyses may suffer from an omitted variable bias because they...

Qualitative surveys enjoy huge popularity among business cycle analysts and research institutes since they provide fast information on the stance of the economy. However, in order to derive quantitative statements researchers have to rely on assumptions about the relation between quantitative...

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...