Summary A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable...

Project success, which is critical to achieve, requires a competent project manager. Could anybody become a skilled project manager, or what does it take? One factor that is considered to influence the opportunities of succeeding is individuals' personality traits. Which ones would be suitable...

Abstract This paper studies the business cycle dynamics of income and wealth distributions in the context of the neoclassical growth model where agents are heterogeneous in initial wealth and non-acquired skills. Our economy admits a representative consumer which enables us to characterize...

Abstract The relative demand for skills has increased considerably in many OECD countries during recent decades. This development is potentially explained by capital-skill complementarity and high growth rates of capital equipment. When production functions are characterized by capital-skill...

Summary This paper applies multivariate linear discriminant analysis to classify West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994 into a four phase scheme (upswing, downswing, and upper/lower turning point phases). It describes the scheme as well as the selection of the classifying variables, and...

Summary In pursuing their plans economic agents regularly have to adjust their pacing of orders, production, and deliveries in unanticipated ways. Information constraints turn many of these adjustments into myopic reactions to accelerations/decelerations observed in the activity level of...

Summary Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as...

Summary This paper examines changes of the (West) German business cycle from 1958 to 2004. It starts with a multivariate linear discriminant analysis (LDA) based decomposition of the cycle into 4 phases (upswing, upper turning point, downswing, lower turning point). After examining...

Summary Generational accounting is - given the future demographic developments in OECD countries - an established tool to quantify the fiscal situation of public coffers. However, as all economic methods dealing with future developments it has critical points. One in particular is the...

Abstract In mid-2013 the macroeconomic situation in European crisis economies started to show signs of recovery. In the political debate, improving economic conditions were often attributed to recently enacted structural reforms. In this paper, we use empirical business cycle models to...