The paper investigates the predictive power of a new survey implemented by the Federal Employment Agency (FEA) for forecasting German unemployment in the short run. Every month, the CEOs of the FEA’s regional agencies are asked about their expectations of future labor market developments. We...

This paper provides a new perspective on the exchange rate disconnect puzzle by referring to the expectations building mechanism in foreign exchange markets. We analyze the role of expectations regarding macroeconomic fundamentals for expected exchange rate changes. In doing so, we assess...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

This paper provides a new perspective on the exchange rate disconnect puzzle by referring to the expectations building mechanism in foreign exchange markets. Therefore, we analyze the role of expectations regarding macroeconomic fundamentals for expected exchange rate changes. In doing so, we...

Do financial market analysts use structural economic models when forecasting exchange rates? This is the leading question analysed in this apper. In contrast to other studies we use expectations instead of realised data. Therefore we analyse the implicit structural models forecasters have in...

This paper exploits a recent and granular data set for 1,500 German LSIs to conduct a residential mortgage stress testing exercise. To account for model uncertainty when modeling PD dynamics we use a benchmark-constrained Bayesian model averaging approach that combines standard BMA with a...