The paper investigates the predictive power of a new survey implemented by the Federal Employment Agency (FEA) for forecasting German unemployment in the short run. Every month, the CEOs of the FEA’s regional agencies are asked about their expectations of future labor market developments. We...

Using German data this study applies an unobserved-components approach to disentangle the unemployment rate into a (stochastic) trend and a cyclical part and to estimate the influence of these components on labor participation. The persistent trend component of unemployment, which triggers...