Mit Konjunkturprognosen wird auf hochaggregierter Ebene die Entwicklung der Wirtschaft im jeweils laufenden und im darauffolgenden Jahr vorausgeschätzt. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Aussagen über Tempoänderungen und Wendepunkte von makroökonomischen Variablen im zyklischen Wirtschaftsgeschehen....

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

The predictive likelihood is of particular relevance in a Bayesian setting when the purpose is to rank models in a forecast comparison exercise. This paper discusses how the predictive likelihood can be estimated for any subset of the observable variables in linear Gaussian state-space models...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy,exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

This study analyzes the performance of the IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts for world output and the aggregates of both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current and the next year, we examine whether IMF forecasts can be...

This paper presents a method to conduct early estimates of GDP growth in Germany. We employ MIDAS regressions to circumvent the mixed frequency problem and use pooling techniques to summarize efficiently the information content of the various indicators. More specifically, we investigate whether...

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...

Forecast models with large cross-sections are often subject to overparameterization leading to unstable parameter estimates and hence inaccurate forecasts. Recent articlessuggest that a large Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with sufficient prior information dominates competing approaches....

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a unique 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...