Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

Der 2009 im Handel durchgeführte "Test des Tests" durchlief bis zur endgültigen Version verschiedene Konzeptionsphasen. Zunächst wurden die Fragebögen der früheren Meta-Umfragen als Orientierungsmaßstab insbesondere hinsichtlich Zielvorstellung, Wortlaut und Umfang herangezogen und auf die...

Nach den Meldungen der etwa 500 Experten aus 66 Ländern, die sich im Oktober an der Umfrage beteiligten, hat sich das internationale Wirtschaftsklima weiter aufgehellt. Besonders in Westeuropa haben die positiven Erwartungen merklich zugenommen. Die längerfristigen Wachstumsprognosen, die...

The dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates is difficult to replicate with models, and even models with a proven track record of empirical performance have underperformed since the early 2000s. On the other hand, survey expectations are accurate predictors of yields, but only...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of global imbalances since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates based...

This paper develops a methodology for estimating the parameters of dynamic opinion or expectation formation processes with social interactions. We study a simple stochastic framework of a collective process of opinion formation by a group of agents who face a binary decision problem. The...

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as has that business-related services. Regardless of its growing overall economic importance, official statistics fail to provide economic researchers and economic policy with current data on the...

This paper aims at providing business survey analysts with simple econometric tools to quantify qualitative survey data. We extend the traditional and commonly applied method proposed by Carlson and Parkin (1975) to capture observable survey respondent heterogeneity. We also discuss...