As one of the main pillars of the ifo Institute's economic research, the ifo Business Survey has been conducted monthly since 1949, a year after the foundation of the ifo Institute. Since then, ifo has extended its survey activity by developing and administering additional business, expert, and...

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...

In an effort to address the lacuna in leading indicator studies of African economies and Nigeria in particular, this paper examines the causal relationships among stock market prices, real GDP and the index of industrial production in Nigeria, using quarterly data from 1984Q1 to 2008Q4. Granger...