The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the “death of the cycle”. Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

In this paper we examine whether data from business tendency surveys are useful for forecasting the macro economy in the short run. Our analyses primarily concern the growth rates of real GDP but we also evaluate forecasts of other variables such as unemployment, price and wage inflation,...

This paper proposes a measure of real-time inflation expectations based on metadata, i.e., data about data, constructed from internet search queries performed on the search engine Google. The forecasting performance of the Google Inflation Search Index (GISI) is assessed relative to 37 other...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

Business and consumer surveys (B-C-S) are qualitative economic surveys designed to deal with judgments and expectations of economic agents and consumers. They are a necessary complement to the quantitative statistical surveys. Information from business and consumer surveys serve as a subset of...

The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the “death of the cycle”. Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

This paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations. In a sample of 92 countries as well as a sample of OECD countries, we find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth. The...

We review the literature on business-cycle correlation between the euro area and Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), a topic that has gained attention in recent years as new EU entrants prepare for participation in the monetary union. Our meta-analysis suggests several CEECs already...