The strong economic upswing in Germany has taken a break. For the current year, we revise our GDP growth forecast down by 0.5 percentage points to 2.0 percent. However, the slowdown in economic activity at the beginning of the year is mainly due to temporary factors. We therefore expect growth...

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 study uses Markov-switching models to evaluate the informational content of the term structure as a predictor of recessions in eight OECD countries. The empirical results suggest that for all countries the term spread is sensibly modelled as a two-state regime-switching process. Moreover,...