International tourism is one of the most important sectors of the open economy. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects that income as gross domestic product, tourism price as the real exchange rate, and travel cost as the price of Brent crude oil have on inbound tourism demand...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

This paper analyzes which factors are driving the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment. Using the results of a poll among survey participants as well as Granger causality tests we identify three groups of influence factors: other sentiment indicators, financial variables and real economy data. In...

We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

In this paper we present two new composite leading indicators of economicactivity in Germany estimated using a dynamic factor model with and withoutregime switching. The obtained optimal inferences of business cycle turningpoints indicate that the two-state regime switching procedure leads to...

In this paper we present two new composite leading indicators of economicactivity in Germany estimated using a dynamic factor model with and withoutregime switching. The obtained optimal inferences of business cycle turningpoints indicate that the two-state regime switching procedure leads to...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...

Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as Markov-switching...

One channel of business cycle shock transmission which gained attraction only recently is the confidence channel. The aim of the paper is to find out whether the confidence channel is actually working between the US and Germany. This is analysed using times series methods. In contrast to other...