Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

Die Gemeinschaftsdiagnose prognostiziert für 2013 eine leichte Konjunkturbelebung für die Weltwirtschaft. Die Entwicklung in Europa ist dagegen mit Unsicherheiten behaftet. Deutschland wird allerdings wohl etwas rascher wachsen als die EU im Durchschnitt. Dabei kommen die entscheidenden...

Die deutsche Exportindustrie ist traditionell auf die Lieferung von Investitionsgütern spezialisiert. Daher kann die Schätzung der zukünftigen Entwicklung der Investitionsgüterexporte für die Prognose der gesamten deutschen Ausfuhren von Nutzen sein. Die Investitionstätigkeit von...

There is a broad agreement that transportation activity is closely linked to the business cycle. Nevertheless, data from the transportation sector have not been part of the tool kit of business cycle analysts due to long publications lags. With the disseminations of electronic road pricing...

This paper investigates the reasons for the exceptionally robust performance of the German labour market during the Great Recession. While GDP dropped by more than five per cent in 2009, employment remained constant and started to increase soon after. We compare this recession to other major...

This paper presents a revised version of the DIW Economic Barometer, the business cycle index of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As in earlier versions, we put forward a factor model on a monthly frequency to filter the latent state of the aggregate economy. In the new...

We study the forecasting performance of three alternative large scale approaches using a dataset for Germany that consists of 123 variables in quarterly frequency. These three approaches handle the dimensionality problem evoked by such a large dataset by aggregating information, yet on different...

The detection of business-cycle turning points is usually performed with non-linear discrete-regime models such as binary dependent variable (e.g., probit or logit) or Markov-switching methods. The probit model has the drawback that the continuous underlying target variable is discretized, with...