The paper analyses whether business cycle fluctuations affect long-run growth. This hypothesis is tested using quarterly time series for the G7-countries. A vector-autoregressive model containing total factor productivity and a survey-based direct measure of the business cycle is estimated. In...

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the past decades. Whether this "Great Moderationʺ can be found in firm level data as well remains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using a balanced panel dataset on German firms that...

We compared forecasts of stock market volatility based on real-time and revised macroeconomic data. To this end, we used a new dataset on monthly real-time macroeconomic variables for Germany. The dataset covers the period 1994-2005. We used a statistical, a utility-based, and an options-based...