Based on a panel of annual data for 17 growth and inflation forecasts from 14 institutions for Germany, we analyse forecast accuracy for the periods before and after the Great Recession, including measures of directional change accuracy based on Receiver Operating Curves (ROC).We find only small...

Based on German business cycle forecast reports covering 10 German institutions for the period 1993-2017, the paper analyses the information content of German forecasters' narratives for German business cycle forecasts. The paper applies textual analysis to convert qualitative text data into...

Enrico Bombieri proved that the ABC Conjecture implies Roth's theorem in 1994. This paper concerns the other direction. In making use of Bombieri's and Van der Poorten's explicit formula for the coefficients of the regular continued fractions of algebraic numbers, we prove that Roth's theorem...

The paper describes the "Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) Forecasting Dashboard (ForDas)". This tool aims at providing, on a non-commercial basis, historical and actual macroeconomic forecast data for the Germany economy to researchers and interested audiences. The database renders it...

Based on monthly data covering the period from 1987 to 2021, we analyse whether cross‐sectional moments of stock market returns may provide information about the future position of the German business cycle. We apply in‐sample forecasting regressions with and without leading indicators as...

Our paper examines the accuracy of growth and inflation forecasts for 19 countries, published by the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany's Joint Diagnosis, or FERI, a private German forecaster, during 2001-2015. Despite dismal accuracy...

Do politics matter for macroprudential policy? I show that changes to macroprudential regulation exhibit a predictable electoral cycle in the run-up to 221 elections across 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Policies restricting mortgages and consumer credit are systematically less likely to...

This paper argues that the distribution of the coefficients of the regular continued fraction should be considered for each algebraic number of degree 2 separately. For random numbers the coefficients are distributed by the Gauss-Kuzmin distribution (also called Khinchin's law). We apply the...