The short article is focused on four issues associated with challenges in estimating and forecasting economic trends during financial crises: difficulties in forecasting the eruption of a large-scaled financial crisis, evaluation of some high-frequency modeling techniques, comparison of two...

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,...

To date, there has been little investigation of the impact of seasonal adjustment on the detection of business cycle expansion and recession regimes. We study this question both analytically and through Monte Carlo simulations. Analytically, we view the occurrence of a single business cycle...

We introduce a novel measure of uncertainty that is based on a business survey in which firms are asked directly how certain or uncertain they are. So far the literature has tried to capture economic uncertainty indirectly by means of expectation errors or the extent of disagreement. Our direct...

Die Weltkonjunktur hat im laufenden Jahr weiter Tritt gefasst, unterstützt von expansiven Impulsen der Geldpolitik und der staatlichen Konjunkturprogramme. Nach Ländern und Regionen differenziert ist die Dynamik der Erholung allerdings recht unterschiedlich. So hat sich das vom ifo Institut...

In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by...

We study whether the accuracy of real-time estimates of the output gap produced by the OECD has improved over time by examining a panel dataset on real-time output gap revisions for 15 countries from 1991 Q1 - 2005 Q4. We use a simple panel data regression and a state space model, with common...

This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by...

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by export price increases (trading gains) rather than export...