Prolonged period of industrial business surveys conducted by the Gaidar Institute and representative range of indicators permit to resolve the first task – analyze the situation in the sector in 2018 – determine the place for the year 2018 in all the 27 years since the IET launched and...

This paper examines Australia’s terms of trade boom since 2003 with a particular interest in quantifying the links between the terms of trade and sectoral performance and identifying an associated ‘secondary services boom’. Comparative static general equilibrium modelling and empirical...

We investigate the circumstances in which business cycle forecasting is beneficial for business by addressing both the short-run and the long-run aspects. For an assessment of short-run forecasting we make a distinction between using publicly available information of cycle probabilities and the...

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In the empirical application, we forecast U.S. business cycle turning points with state-level employment data. We find that forecasts...

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...

This paper considers the issue of predicting cyclical turning points using real-time diffusion indexes constructed using a large data set from March 2005 to September 2014. We construct diffusion indexes at the monthly frequency, compare several smoothing and signal extraction methods, and...

We develop a small-scale dynamic factor model for the Swiss economy allowing for non-linearities by means of a two-state Markov-chain. The selection of an appropriate set of indicators utilizes a combinatorial algorithm. The model's forecasting performance is as good as that of peers with richer...

This paper proposes a new methodology based on textual analysis to forecast U.S. recessions. Specifically, the paper develops an index in the spirit of Baker et al. (2016) and Caldara and Iacoviello (2018) which tracks developments in U.S. real activity. When used in a standard recession...