There is a broad agreement that transportation activity is closely linked to the business cycle. Nevertheless, data from the transportation sector have not been part of the tool kit of business cycle analysts due to long publications lags. With the disseminations of electronic road pricing...

National accounts are subject to major revisions. To improve the reliability of the first release data, it is important to know whether these revisions show systematic patterns, or in other words, whether national accounts are informational efficient in the sense that they incorporate all...

The Diebold-Mariano-Test has become a common tool to compare the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. Since these are typically model-free forecasts, distribution free tests might be a good alternative to the Diebold-Mariano-Test. This paper suggests a permutation test. Stochastic simulations...

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...

The accuracy of macroeconomic forecast depends on various factors, most importantly the mix of analytical methods used by the individual forecasters, the way that their personal experience is shaping their identification strategies, but also their efficiency in translating new information into...

For many observers the beginning of a dynamic economic and stock market upswing in the U.S. in the mid 1990s marked the start of a new era, the times of the new economy. This phenomenon has been under intense discussion ever since - both in the political arena as well as among scientists....