With the widespread application of inventory control Systems in industry and trade and a fast growing Services sector the influence of inventory changes on the business sector should become less important over time. However, the empirical eyidence for Germany in the period 1970-1994 shows that...

The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2003 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among...

The paper reports results of a survey among active forecasters of the German business cycle. Relying on 82 respondents from 37 different institutions, we investigate what models and theories forecasters subscribe to and find that they are pronounced conservative in the sense, that they...

Based on a panel of annual data for 17 growth and inflation forecasts from 14 institutions for Germany, we analyse forecast accuracy for the periods before and after the Great Recession, including measures of directional change accuracy based on Receiver Operating Curves (ROC).We find only small...

The paper reports results of a survey among active forecasters of the German business cycle. Relying on 82 respondents from 37 different institutions, we investigate what models and theories forecasters subscribe to and find that they are pronounced conservative in the sense, that they...

The paper describes the "Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) Forecasting Dashboard (ForDas)". This tool aims at providing, on a non-commercial basis, historical and actual macroeconomic forecast data for the Germany economy to researchers and interested audiences. The database renders it...