The role of the housing market in the everyday life of society is difficult to overestimate. The housing rents and prices directly affect standard of living of virtually every person. Housing loans constitute the largest liability of households and account for a large proportion of bank lending....

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (states) simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, such as pooled and fixed-effects models, we apply panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence...

We apply the novel approach of Siliverstovs (2015) to modelling data sampled at different frequencies in order to scrutinise the composition of one of the most influential economic indicators in Switzerland. The Purchasing Managers' Index consists of eight sub-indices out of which only five...

In this paper we extend the targeted-regressor approach suggested in Bai and Ng (2008) for variables sampled at the same frequency to mixed-frequency data. Our MIDASSO approach is a combination of the unrestricted MIxed-frequency DAta-Sampling approach (U-MIDAS) (see Foroni et al., 2015; Castle et...

Based on annual data for growth and inflation forecasts for Germany covering the time span from 1970 to 2007 and up to 17 different forecasts per year, we test for a possible asymmetry of the forecasters' loss function and estimate the degree of asymmetry for each forecasting institution using...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...

In this paper we suggest an approach to comparison of models' forecasting performance in unstable environments. Our approach is based on combination of the Cumulated Sum of Squared Forecast Error Differential (CSSFED) suggested earlier in Welch and Goyal (2008) and the Bayesian change point...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

In this paper, we investigate whether the Google search activity can help in nowcasting the year-on-year growth rates of monthly US private consumption using a real-time data set. The Google-based forecasts are compared to those based on a benchmark AR(1) model and the models including the...