Summary Inventory fluctuations play an important role in the formation of business cycles. In Germany, little research has been dedicated to this topic recently. In this study, a structural time series model in the tradition of Harvey (1989) is employed to decompose German inventory investment...

Summary This paper considers popular methods for the quantification of survey expectations. We investigate the asymptotic properties of two variants of the probability approach originally suggested by Carlson and Parkin (1975). It is argued that the traditional method can be interpreted as an...

Summary We use oil price forecasts from the Consensus Economic Forecast poll for the time period Oct. 1989 - Dec. 2008 to analyze how forecasters form their expectations. Our findings indicate that the extrapolative as well as the regressive expectation formation hypothesis play a role. Standard...

Abstract Our study provides evidence for firms’ evaluation of location quality. We use a 2004 survey of 6,000 East German firms that contained questions on the importance and assessment of 15 different location factors ranging from closeness to customers and suppliers, transport...

Abstract This paper employs a novel firm-level dataset that combines financial accounts of German firms with data from a business survey to shed new light on the demand for capital. The empirical analysis employs firm-specific indicators in order to explore the effects of sales, the cost of...