Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by...

Das Papier untersucht die Rolle von Frühindikatoren bei der Erstellung von Konjunkturprognosen. Gegenstand der Analyse sind die Fragen: Welche Kriterien sollten Frühindikatoren generell erfüllen bzw. was sollten Frühindikatoren leisten? Inwieweit erfüllen die gängigen Indikatoren diese...

Using aggregate data, the paper analyzes the importance of inventory investment for German business cycles since 1960. In contrast to U.S. experience, the traditional productionsmoothing/ buffer-stock model is not rejected by empirical evidence. Preliminary national accounts data of inventory...

This paper discusses various approaches to decompose economic time series into their trend and cyclical components. For over 30 years now, the Deutsche Bundesbank publishes trend-adjusted indicators in its Statistical Supplement 4 entitled ?Seasonally Adjusted Business Statistics? which are...

We report results on the ex ante predictability of monthly excess stock returns in Germany using real-time and revised macroeconomic data. Our real-time macroeconomic data cover the period 1994-2005. We report three results. 1) Real-time macroeconomic data did not contribute much to ex ante...

When analyzing business cycle data, one observes that the relevant predictor variables are often highly correlated. This paper presents a method to obtain measures of importance for the classification of data in which such multicollinearity is present. In systems with highly correlated variables...

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...

This article contributes to the literature on macroeconomic announcements and their impact on asset prices by investigating how the 15-second Xetra DAX returns reflect the monthly announcements of the two best known business cycle forecasts for Germany, i.e. the ifo Business Climate Index and...

This paper considers factor forecasting with national versus factor forecasting withinternational data. We forecast German GDP based on a large set of about 500 time series, consisting of German data as well as data from Euro-area and G7 countries. For factor estimation, we consider standard...