In this paper, we study the predictive power of electricity consumption data for regional economic activity. Using unique weekly and monthly electricity consumption data for the second-largest German state, the Free State of Bavaria, we conduct a pseudo out-of-sample forecasting experiment for...

Die Corona-Krise untermauerte die Notwendigkeit unkonventioneller Datenquellen zur zeitnahen Beurteilung der aktuellen Wirtschaftslage. Besonders schwierig ist die Datenlage der Bundesländer. In diesem Forschungsbericht wird untersucht, ob sich hochfrequente Angaben zum bayerischen...

The ifo Institute is Germany’s largest business survey provider, with the ifo Business Climate Germany as one of the most important leading indicators for gross domestic product. However, the ifo Business Survey is not solely limited to the Business Climate and also delivers a multitude of...

In this study, we systematically evaluate the potential of a bunch of survey-based indicators from different economic branches to forecasting export growth across a multitude of European countries. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses reveal that the best-performing indicators beat a well-specified...

In this study, we evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errors for export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and cost competitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses and forecastencompassing tests reveal that survey-based indicators...

Accurate real-time macroeconomic data are essential for policy-making and economic nowcasting. In this paper, I introduce a real-time database for German regional economic accounts (READ-GER). The database contains real-time information for nine macroeconomic aggregates and the 16 German states....

In this paper, we disentangle tax revenue forecast errors into influences stemming from wrong macroeconomic assumptions and false predictions of the elasticities linking the tax base to its corresponding tax type. Across six tax types and the overall tax sum for Germany, we find a heterogeneous...

In this paper we evaluate the forecasting power of employment expectations for total employment in 15 European states. Our data cover the period from 1998Q1 to 2012Q4. With in-sample and pseudo out-of-sample exercises we find that for most of the European states considered, the survey–based...