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...

Die Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen (VGR) der Länder werden oft als Erfolgsnachweis der Wirtschaftspolitik eines Bundeslandes verwendet. Allerdings werden die Angaben im Laufe der Zeit erheblich revidiert. Dadurch ändert sich die Positionierung der Länder in einer "Wachstumsrangliste"...

Eine wesentliche Grundlage für makroökonomische Analysen sind die Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen (VGR). Für Deutschland werden diese vom Statistischen Bundesamt vierteljährlich veröffentlicht. Die erste Veröffentlichung basiert noch auf unvollständigen Daten, so dass die Angaben...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...

Maravall and del Riacute;o (2001), analized the time aggregation properties of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, which decomposes a time series into trend and cycle, for the case of annual, quarterly, and monthly data, and showed that aggregation of the disaggregate component cannot be obtained...

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is aimed at standardizing and disseminating world economic indicators for policy analysis and scholarly work on the role of globalization. The purpose of DGEI is to offer a broad perspective on how economic...

Proposals for incorporating information on the quality of human, social, and environmental conditions in more authentic and comprehensive versions of the Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) date back to the foundations of econometrics.Typically treated as external to...

Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed...

Proposals for incorporating information on the quality of human, social, and environmental conditions in more authentic and comprehensive versions of the Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) date back to the foundations of econometrics. Typically treated as external to...

Incorporating currents events into an economics curriculum is a goal of many dedicated instructors. The benefits of doing so are obvious. Unfortunately, the costs associated with implementation are non-trivial. In the following, I introduce an experiential writing assignment, called the...