We investigate the predictive power of several leading indicators in order to forecast industrial production in Germany. In addition, we compare their predictive performance with variables from two competing categories, namely macroeconomic and financial variables. The predictive power within...

This study uses a Bayesian VAR to demonstrate that the recent house price boom in Germany can be explained by falling interest rates and that higher interest rates are likely suciffient to stop the increase of German house prices. The latter suggests a potential drawback of the current monetary...

Correlation models, such as Constant Conditional Correlation (CCC) GARCH model or Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) GARCH model, play a crucial role in forecasting Value-at-Risk (VaR) or Expected Shortfall (ES). The additional inclusion of constant correlation tests into correlation models...

We propose a prior for VAR models that exploits the panel structure of macroeconomic time series while also providing shrinkage towards zero to address overfitting concerns. The prior is flexible as it detects shared dynamics of individual variables across endogenously determined groups of...

This study considers Bayesian variable selection in the Phillips curve context by using the Bernoulli approach of Korobilis (2013a). The Bernoulli model, however, is unable to account for model change over time, which is important if the set of relevant predictors changes over time. To tackle...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance...

This article compares two types of monetary policy rules - the Taylor-Rule and the Orphanides-Rule - with respect to their forecasting properties for the policy rates of the European Central Bank. In this respect the basic rules, results from estimated models and augmented rules are compared....

In this paper we argue that future inflation in an economy depends on the way people perceive current inflation, their inflation sentiment. We construct some simple measures of inflation sentiment which capture whether price acceleration is shared by many components of the CPI basket. In a...