Could a researcher or policy analyst use data reported from surveys of consumer confidence to improve forecasts of consumer spending? This issue has been examined in the literature previously, which reached the conclusion that consumer confidence helped improve the forecasts slightly. But that...

In this paper, we use the Wall Street Journal poll of FX forecasts to analyze how the group of forecasters form their expectations. One focus is whether forecasters build rational expectations. Furthermore, we analyze whether the group of forecasters can be regarded as homogeneous or...

This paper studies the signalling effect of the consumption-wealth ratio (cay) on German stock returns via vector error correction models (VECMs). The effect of cay on U.S. stock returns has been recently confirmed by Lettau and Ludvigson with a two-stage method. In this paper, performances of...

This paper argues that the banking crises in the United States in the early 1930s were similar to the ?twin crises? -- banking and balance of payments crises -- which have occurred in developing countries in recent years. The downturn that began in 1929 undermined banks that had made risky loans...

Various inflation forecasting models are compared using a simulated out-of-sample forecasting framework. We focus on the question of whether monetary aggregates are useful for forecasting inflation, but unlike previous work we examine a wide range of forecast horizons and allow for estimated as...

Henrik Enderlein, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, befürchtet, dass die Erwartungen, die mit der Wahl Barack Obamas zum neuen US-Präsidenten verknüpft sind, zu hoch seien. Obama erbe mit seinem Amtsantritt eine kaum zu bewältigende ökonomische Herausforderung, so dass die...

Die Fehlleistungen der marktbeherrschenden US-amerikanischen Ratingagenturen ließen den Wunsch nach Etablierung einer großen europäischen Ratingagentur laut werden. Erich Harbrecht und Martin Wieland, Deutsche Bundesbank, halten eine Forderung nach einem Gegengewicht zu US-Agenturen nicht...