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...

Forecasting real economic activity poses a considerable challenge not only due to hard-to-predict events like the current financial crisis but also due to the fact that targeted variables often undergo significant revisions after their first publication. In this paper we report the results of a...

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...