We evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errors for export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and cost competitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyzes and forecast encompassing tests reveal that survey-based indicators outperform...

Nowadays, a solid budget serves as an important quality signal for the electorate. Therefore, politicians might face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts which are widely regarded as a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, we systematically...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall (1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive for regional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow for interdependencies between these two...

Solid budgets serve as important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians mighttherefore face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regardedas a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, inthis study we systematically analyze...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a large data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

We evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errors for export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and cost competitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyzes and forecast encompassing tests reveal that survey-based indicators outperform...

In this paper we evaluate the forecasting performance of employment expectations for employment growth in 15 European states. Our data cover the period from the first quarter 1998 to the fourth quarter 2014. With in-sample analyses and pseudo out-ofsample exercises, we find that for most of the...

In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to forecast gross value-added (GVA) and its sectoral subcomponents at the regional level. With an autoregressive distributed lagmodel we forecast total and sectoral GVA for one German state (Saxony) with more than 300 indicators from different...

This paper applies component-wise boosting to the topic of regional economic forecasting. Component-wise boosting is a pre-selection algorithm of indicators for forecasting. By using unique quarterly real gross domestic product data for two German states (the Free State of Saxony and...