The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

By using the Economic Sentiment Indicator and Autoregressive Markov Switching models, this paper provides an effective tool to identify and characterize expectations of business cycle phases for Germany, Spain, the Euro Area, and the European Union. This information is useful for policy makers...

This paper analyses how firm-specific forecast errors derived from survey data of German manufacturing firms over 2007–2011 affect firms’ investment propensity. Understanding how forecast errors affect firm investment behaviour is key to mitigate economic downturns during and after crisis...

Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of...

Severe simultaneous recessions are defined to occur when at least half of the countries under investigation (Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) are in recession simultaneously. I pose two new research questions that extend upon stylized facts for US recessions....

High-frequency financial and economic activity indicators are usually time aggregated before forecasts of low-frequency macroeconomic events, such as recessions, are computed. We propose a mixed-frequency modelling alternative that delivers high-frequency probability forecasts (including their...

I propose a novel approach to uncover business cycle reports' priorities and relate them to economic fluctuations. To this end, I leverage quantitative business-cycle forecasts published by leading German economic research institutes since 1970 to estimate the proportions of latent topics in...

This paper sheds light on the impact of global macroeconomic uncertainty on the euro area economy. We build on the methodology proposed by Jurado et al. (2015) and estimate global as well as country-specific measures of economic uncertainty for fifteen key euro area trade partners and the euro...