This paper develops a discrete-time epidemiological model for the spread of crises across sectors in the United States for the period 1952-2015. It is the first to use an epidemiological approach with macroeconomic (Flow of Funds) data. An extension of the usual one-period Markov model to a...

This paper studies shock transmission across macroeconomic sectors in the UK, using data from the Bank of England's Flow of Funds statistics. We combine two different approaches to quantify the spread of shocks to assess whether sectors with large bilateral economic linkages as measured through...

In this paper, we empirically assess the extent to which early release inefficiency and definitional change affect prediction precision. In particular, we carry out a series of ex-ante prediction experiments in order to examine: the marginal predictive content of the revision process, the...

I process credit-card consumption data through an input-output model of sectoral linkages to impute the sector-level output responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. The sector-level consumption responses are highly dispersed and even positive for some. Yet, all sectors suffer from output losses....

Google Trends have become a popular data source for social science research. We show that for small countries or sub-national regions like U.S. states, underlying sampling noise in Google Trends can be substantial. The data may therefore be unreliable for time series analysis and is furthermore...

Das vorliegende Handbuch soll einen Überblick über die Befragungen des ifo Instituts sowie die daraus resultierenden Konjunkturindikatoren und deren Verwendung für die Prognose volkswirtschaftlicher Kennzahlen liefern. Des Weiteren ist es als Interpretationshilfe für den Umgang mit den...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

We present a methodology based on quarterly sectoral accounts to build a map of the euro area financial system. The map can be used to visualise existing cross-sectoral interconnections and exposures, to analyse how the main bilateral positions have evolved over time, and to understand how past...

We specify an empirical model of US inflation which has the dynamics of wage and price setting at its core. In the dynamic wage equation an equilibrium-correction term connects the wage level to industrial prosperity indicators. In that way, the role of wage setting in the dynamics of the...

Global growth prospects have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the year, raising the specter of global recession. This paper relies on insights gleaned from previous global recessions to analyze the recent evolution of economic activity and policies and presents plausible...