In this paper we forecast the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (States) simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature that addresses this question for all German Länder as most of the studies try to forecast the...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the...

The role of the housing market in the everyday life of society is difficult to overestimate. The housing rents and prices directly affect standard of living of virtually every person. Housing loans constitute the largest liability of households and account for a large proportion of bank lending....

We suggest an alternative indicator based on the car sales price placed on the Internet for measuring economic inequality among regions. The regional data on car prices in Germany were downloaded from two specialised websites http://www.mobile.de and http://www.autoscout24.de in December 2011....

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...