Based on German business cycle forecast reports covering 10 German institutions for the period 1993-2017, the paper analyses the information content of German forecasters' narratives for German business cycle forecasts. The paper applies textual analysis to convert qualitative text data into...

We evaluate the economic value of business cycle forecasts for potential investors on financial markets as opposed to statistical measures of forecasts accuracy. Taking Germany as an example, and based on annual data ranging from 1990 to 2016 covering 16 institutions and 18 different forecasts,...

Based on a panel of annual data for 17 growth and inflation forecasts from 14 institutions for Germany, we analyse forecast accuracy for the periods before and after the Great Recession, including measures of directional change accuracy based on Receiver Operating Curves (ROC).We find only small...