It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

We examine the information content of a newly created news sentiment index from over 300,000 articles from some of the most widely read newspapers in the US to explain changes in the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1995 to 2009. Using ARMA-models, we show that consumer...

There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis' impact on GDP. Impulse Response Functions (IRF) estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that the effects of earlier crises were long-lasting. We show that standard estimates of IRFs are highly sensitive to...

We evaluate the informational content of ex post and ex ante predictors of periods of excess stock (market) valuation. For a cross section comprising 10 OECD economies and a time span of at most 40 years alternative binary chronologies of price bubble periods are determined. Using these...

We estimate the impulse response function (IRF) of GDP toa banking crisis, applying an extension of the local projectionsmethod developed in Jorda (2005). This method is shown to bemore robust to misspecification than calculating IRFs analytically. However, it suffers from a hitherto unnoticed...

Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level. As a result, the need for economic forecasts at a sub-national level is rapidly increasing. The data available to compute regional forecasts is usually based on a pseudo-panel that...

In this paper, a set of neural network (NN) models is developed to compute short-term forecasts of regional employment patterns in Germany. NNs are modern statistical tools based on learning algorithms that are able to process large amounts of data. NNs are enjoying increasing interest in...

The paper provides probability estimates of the state of the GDP growth. A regime-switching model defines the probability of the Greek GDP being in boom or recession. Then probit models extract the predictive information of a set of explanatory (economic and financial) variables regarding the...

Many macroeconometric models depict situations where the shares of the major demand aggregates in output are stable over time. The joint dynamic behavior of the considered demand aggregate and output may thus be approximated by a cointegrated vector autoregression. However, the shares of many...