By international comparison the productivity development of the overall economy in Germany has taken a serious hit after the reunification boom. Since then Germany has fallen behind not only in comparison to the USA and emerging-market nations like South Korea, but also in comparison to other EU...

Die gesamtwirtschaftliche Produktivitätsentwicklung in Deutschland ist nach dem Wiedervereinigungsboom im internationalen Vergleich deutlich eingebrochen. Nicht nur gegenüber den USA und Schwellenländern wie Südkorea, sondern auch im Vergleich zu anderen EU-Staaten fiel Deutschland seitdem...

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...

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...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...