In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually,...

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...

Im folgenden Beitrag werden für das abgelaufene Jahr die Gründe für aufgetretene Differenzen zwischen Prognose und Wirklichkeit diskutiert. Angesichts der Größenordung der weltwirtschaftlichen Verwerfungen, die durch die globale Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise 2008/09 ausgelöst wurden, sind...

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...